[Taxacom] Why Taxonomy does NOT matter

[Frederick W. Schueler]

On 4/18/2011 9:36 AM, Kim van der Linde wrote:
> Let's play advocate of the devil.

* to repeat the call in my recent post: what Fabian is asking for is 
*specimens* of actual arguments made by those in a position to influence 
the underfunding of taxonomy/systematics.

Maybe these don't exist, and the underfunding of taxonomy is either an 
unspoken conspiracy or an accident? I'm intrigued by the absence of a 
flood of "My adminstrator told me taxonomy doesn't deserve funding 
because..." stories.

fred.
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>
> Taxonomy is completely irrelevant. Why? Well, ultimately, all that
> counts in most contexts is our ability to determine boundaries between
> groups of interbreeding individuals. What name they have, ultimately, is
> irrelevant, a standardized English name would do equally well because
> the species can still be identified, conserved and talked about. This
> phenomenon is already observed in cases where taxonomists change names
> of species that are completely ignored by the community at large (for
> example Aedes aegypti) and in groups that have experienced frequent name
> changes to the point that the researchers of those species use only the
> common name of the species to find articles (for example Zebrafish). The
> idea that we need names of higher taxa for comparative analyzes is
> bogus, because as long as we have sequences of the individuals we work
> with, we can create a distance matrix and map changes in character
> states across them and determine how they have changed. In short, we can
> eliminate the whole field of taxonomy without much trouble for the rest
> of biology.
>

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          Frederick W. Schueler & Aleta Karstad
Bishops Mills Natural History Centre - http://pinicola.ca/bmnhc.htm
now in the field on the Thirty Years Later Expedition -
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     RR#2 Bishops Mills, Ontario, Canada K0G 1T0
   on the Smiths Falls Limestone Plain 44* 52'N 75* 42'W
    (613)258-3107 <bckcdb at istar.ca> http://pinicola.ca/
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