[Taxacom] FW: article on taxonomy

Mon Mar 1 22:08:32 CST 2010

Donald H. Colless
CSIRO Div of Entomology
GPO Box 1700
Canberra 2601
don.colless at csiro.au
tuz li munz est miens envirun

________________________________________
From: Colless, Donald (Entomology, Black Mountain)
Sent: 02 March 2010 15:02
To: Steve Manning
Subject: RE: [Taxacom] article on taxonomy

I think it's true to say that in Australia the majority of taxonomists are employed by museums or government agencies such as CSIRO. Perhaps this should be the norm elsewhere - assuming, of course, that other governments are similarly enlightened.

Donald H. Colless
CSIRO Div of Entomology
GPO Box 1700
Canberra 2601
don.colless at csiro.au
tuz li munz est miens envirun

________________________________________
From: taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu [taxacom-bounces at mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Steve Manning [sdmanning at asub.edu]
Sent: 02 March 2010 03:10
To: Dean Pentcheff; taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] article on taxonomy

At 01:33 PM 2/28/2010, Dean Pentcheff wrote:
>[posted from Salt Lake City airport -- if Richard Pyle can keep up on
>this conversation between dives in Fiji, the least I can do is an
>airport posting. But I'd rather be between dives in Fiji...]
>
>Do I want to save all the world's biodiversity? Bluntly, what I want
>doesn't matter much at all. I am not in a policy position. Do I think
>we (the largest possible sense of the world "we") should try to save
>what we can? Yes.
>
>Policy decision-makers are being charged with making trade-off
>decisions. Develop this tract or that tract? Invest in this one 10,000
>hectare no-take zone or in these 5 2,000 hectare reduced-take zones?
>I'm certainly not naive enough to think that the decisions are always
>(or should always) be based on full biodiversity analyses of all
>contingencies. But I know for sure that if the biodiversity
>information isn't immediately and easily available, it won't enter
>into the decision process at all.
>
>That's the sense in which I stand as a stauch advocate of efforts to
>make taxonomic information (by itself a small part of biodiversity
>knowledge) more accessible, more linked, and less the province of
>individuals working in isolation. I think, Bob, that you and I
>probably agree fully on that. We may differ on the particulars of
>which alphabet-soup agencies we happen to think are doing a good job
>at that, and which are redundant preserves of bureaucrats.
>
>
>On a different (though related note), I keep seeing pleas (or
>arguments) here on the need or desirability for academic taxonomy to
>receive more funding and more positions. No one has pointed out the
>core reason why this will never happen within the U.S. funding scheme
>(I can't address other systems, since I don't know them).
>
>The key determinant in the U.S. is not publication impact factor. It
>is ability to generate research overhead money. That's where taxonomy
>utterly fails to be competitive. It's not the fault of taxonomy or
>taxonomists -- it's just the nature of the field.
>
>A taxonomist can conceivably write a US$3million grant for a 5 year
>project (or be a collaborator on such a grant). A taxonomist needs a
>few thousand dollars of travel money, a microscope, maybe a postoc and
>grad student salary, and... um... well... that's about it. With that,
>a fine taxonomist can do excellent work.
>
>The institution gets (roughly) 50% of that money for general expenses,
>say US$1.5million.

If this is really the norm, then maybe we should lobby the granting
agencies to stop giving out 50% of their money for general
expenses.  And/or lobby University administrators to hire taxonomists
as part of those "general expenses"!

Let's be more efficient about our distributions of funds even if it
means hiring full-time employees in a separate entity by a non-profit
or a government.  In the U.S. how about a "U. S. Department of
Biological Exploration and Classification" whose employees would
systematically (pun intended) have this as its primary
responsibility  (hopefully in collaboration with comparable
organizations elsewhere.)  Or maybe a United Nations agency would be
a good thing, parallel to UNICEF.

Universities still employ people in the humanities, history, etc. -
how do they find the money to do that?  I think if we convince the
powers that be in most Universities that hiring taxonomists is a
crucial part of academic integrity, academic reputation, (which it
is) and even for accreditation, the norm may shift and at that point
it won't seem too expensive to most of the world's Universities to
devote (moderate) funding to exploration/taxonomy - whatever is
needed.  Of course, travel expenses will be involved!

Steve

>The cancer cell geneticist next door writes a grant at the same time.
>She'll need a US$750,000 sequencer, US$500,000 of other molecular
>equipment, US$400,000 of reagents, US$250,000 worth of freezers,
>incubation rooms, etc., two postdocs to manage the work, 8 graduate
>students over the 5 years to do the work, travel money for all of them
>for meetings, etc. etc. etc. She'll also do fine work. And the
>institution gets maybe US$5million from her grant.
>
>If you're the dean in charge of that department, you are commiting
>academic suicide to recommend hiring taxonomists. Taxonomists just
>can't spend money fast enough to generate enough overhead to make them
>financially worth having in research universities.
>
>It's not a function of the "respect" taxonomy gets. It's not a
>function of NSF training initiatives. It's a function of the fact that
>taxonomy is intrinsically cheap science. That's why taxonomy is now
>dead in U.S. research universities, and won't come back no matter what
>support is pushed.
>
>-Dean
>--
>Dean Pentcheff
>pentcheff at gmail.com
>dpentch at nhm.org
>
>On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 11:50 PM, Bob Mesibov <mesibov at southcom.com.au> wrote:
> > [This thread is certainly getting people to firm up positions,
> which is good, but if you haven't already done so, please read the
> instigating article (Boero on stupidity).]
> >
> > Dean Pentcheff wrote:
> >
> > "So we have a choice. We can use all our time to inform ourselves
> about our precious biodiversity as it all vanishes. Or we can use
> some of our time to hugely multiply the effectiveness of the
> knowledge we have by making it accessible and useful to the people
> whose decisions really can save the world's biodiversity."
> >
> > It's clear from your post that you want to save as much
> biodiversity as possible in the aggregate, which is the only reason
> anyone could possibly need *all* of the world's biodiversity
> documentation at their fingertips - to make triage decisions.
> Unfortunately, with most of the world's biodiversity still
> undocumented, those decisions are going to be massively
> ill-informed. The people you want to trust to save biodiversity
> know that, and in any case they do *not* make decisions based on
> taxonomic niceties. You may not have seen an exchange I had here
> with Tony Rees on a week ago:
> >
> > '"The first thing these managers / policy persons want is to know
> what biodiversity exists and where." Um, yes, makes them sound like
> they know what they're talking about in their meetings. But the
> second thing (what can we *possibly* do about it?) and the third
> thing (what can we *really* do about it?) have vastly more
> influence on decision-making than knowing names and locality
> records. I'm not being cynical here and saying that science goes
> out the window when deals get done. I'm saying that conservation
> planning involves a lot more than taxonomy, and it simply doesn't
> matter how good the taxonomy is when there are vast gaps in
> knowledge about species biology, biogeography and causes of
> decline. You're in a particularly good position to know this, being
> familiar with the debates about marine reserves in Australia.
> Informed decision-making at those levels has bugger-all to do with
> getting names right.'
> >
> > The choice you offer (above) might be a societal choice, but it
> isn't a personal one. I argued for a personal ethical stance that
> puts discovery and documentation well ahead of tinkering with data
> infrastructure. Smart taxonomists should be doing smart taxonomy.
> And as for making taxonomic information more widely available, I've
> argued here for open taxonomic communities that feed on such
> information and use it to generate new taxonomic work more
> productively than isolated professionals can. That's a better use
> for existing taxonomic information than handing it to, or using it
> to advise, policy-makers who will be quickly marginalised if they
> keep saying 'no' to developers with booming populations and booming
> wants behind them.
> >
> > The effectiveness of conservation isn't limited by what's known.
> We won't get dramatically better outcomes if we know more. We know
> enough: habitats have been and are being destroyed, wild resources
> have been and are being overexploited, pollution and degradation
> are steadily getting worse and more and more species are going
> invasive outside their natural ranges. In an era of extinction the
> job of a taxonomist (IMO) isn't to stand Canute-like at the shore
> and say that with better access to taxonomic information we can
> hold back the incoming tide of massive overpopulation. It's to
> document what's going extinct.
> > --
> > Dr Robert Mesibov
> > Honorary Research Associate
> > Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, and
> > School of Zoology, University of Tasmania
> > Home contact: PO Box 101, Penguin, Tasmania, Australia 7316
> > (03) 64371195; 61 3 64371195
> > Website: http://www.qvmag.tas.gov.au/mesibov.html
> >
>
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