[Taxacom] barcode of life wins Ebbe Nielsen Prize

[Kipling (Kip) Will]

To follow up on Donat's comments, I offer two important recent critiques 
of the Barcoding phenomenon:

One that shows how the "enterprise" is using taxonomy while eviscerating 
the science:

Ebache, M.C. and de Carvalho, M.R.. 2010. Anti-intellectualism in the 
DNA Barcoding Enterprise. Zoologia, Vol 27, No 2.

http://submission.scielo.br/index.php/zool/article/view/22823

and another that shows that the Social Scientists are not fooled by the 
hype:

Larson, M.H. 2007. DNA Barcoding: The Social Frontier. Frontiers in 
Ecology and the Environment, Vol. 5, No. 8 (Oct., 2007), pp. 437-442
# Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20440731

Kip Will


Donat Agosti wrote:
> In today's GBIF news letter I discovered the announcement of the Ebbe
> Nielsen Prize winner, Mr. Ratnasingham, credited with the development of the
> Barcode of Life Data (BOLD) systems.  <http://tinyurl.com/248w6qu>
> http://tinyurl.com/248w6qu
> 
>  
> 
> This in itself is fine, but what I find appalling is the statement of the
> Krishtalka, the chair of the GBIF Science Committee, that states "The impact
> and strategic significance of BOLD, according to Krishtalka, promises to
> rival that of Genbank. "BOLD enables a growing number of scientists to both
> register and access critical genomic data in a common way for complex
> research and research applications for science and society, both inside and
> outside the domains of biodiversity science.""
> 
>  
> 
> How comes that BOLD (Advancing species indentification and discovery through
> the analysis of short, standardized gene regions" wants to compete with
> GenBank? How does a short sequence compare with a whole genome? Though
> barcodes make some very important contributions to biology, they can not and
> will never replace the many gene sequences needed for phylogenetic analysis,
> the increasing impact of entire genomes, nor all the other information
> needed to define species, such as the rapidly increasing number of digital
> online images of taxa in a very simple way.
> 
>  
> 
> May be I misunderstand this statement, but the very way it is written in the
> press release, this shows a very questionable attitude of GBIF's Science
> Committee chair, which has little to do with science but rather imperium
> building of missing far sight.
> 
>  
> 
> Donat Agosti 
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
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-- 
Kipling W. Will
Associate Professor/Insect Systematist
Associate Director,Essig Museum of Entomology

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