[Taxacom] Dark taxa: GenBank in a post-taxonomic world

[Bob Mesibov]

Rod's 'post-taxonomic world' is no such thing, unless he's imagining a post-human world, because humans have always been taxonomists. We're taxonomists because we're biologists. We aim to learn as much as possible about life, and we use a system of names as labels to share what we learn.

But here's how it now works: you start with an almost unimaginably complex block of habitat (picture a hectare of reef+its waters, or a hectare of forest), full of a vast variety of living things interacting in an even vaster number of ways. You can learn a great deal about this block, given enough time and ingenuity. Some of what you learn will be of immediate value for human society, and nearly all of what you learn will be awe-inspiring.

Now throw away all the interactions and the habitat's spatial, physical and chemical structure, and just inventory the living organisms. It doesn't matter whether you use Linnean names or species codes. Just reduce the complex living+dead whole to a list of living parts, grouping living individuals by similarity. Ignore the dead parts, because they won't be needed at the next step.

Now throw away everything you know about the living parts, and just retain a few gene sequences from a few entities on the inventory. Congratulations. By progressive reduction you've gotten down to easily manipulable and storable information. What can you do with that information? Infer a few small elements of the Tree of Life. Anything else? Document genetic diversity. Anything else? Point out directions for further gene sampling. And what can you say about that complex habitat you started with? What can you say about the realities of interactions and structure, of living vs dead?

The 'dark' bit here isn't taxa, it's ignorance. This awful reductionism is willful, deliberate ignorance. This isn't a 'new biology'; it isn't biology at all. It's becoming a noisy little corner of information science where people unhappy with the mess and complexity of the real world can play with clean, simple bits of information.

The massive investments in sequencing and GenBank might have been justified as encouraging a way to get benefits for human society more quickly, and it's undeniably true that you don't need taxonomy to rip new pharmaceuticals or GMOs out of the living world. But for purposes of learning about that world and how it works, the enterprise is about as useful as the Laputan project for extracting sunlight from cucumbers.

Please, Rod, stop calling it biology.
-- 
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
Ph: (03) 64371195; 61 3 64371195
Webpage: http://www.qvmag.tas.gov.au/?articleID=570