[Taxacom] Why Taxonomy does NOT matter

[Frederick W. Schueler]

On 4/20/2011 9:13 AM, Robin Leech wrote:
>
> If you have a problem, and you give it to 10 engineers to solve, they
> will forego their differences, work together and give you the answer.
>
> If you have a problem, and you give it to 10 biologists to solve, they
> will each take the problem, not work together, and you may wind up
> with 10 answers.  Mind you, each answer may be correct in itself, but
> there has been no effort to produce a common solution all can agree
> upon.

* but this may be partly because biological problems are so much more 
complex than engineering problems, and especially because those who want 
such problems solved don't want to hear the answers. In one case where 
I've been involved, the sponsoring group has rejected input from 
biologists from a variety of disciplines who each took a different point 
of view but agreed on the central conclusion that the sponsors didn't 
want to hear: "to control eutrophication, reduce nutrient levels in your 
lake." - we each proposed different ways to reduce influx of nutrients, 
or remove or sequester them, but all required changes in behaviour that 
the sponsors didn't want to make, and this included the rejection of the 
idea that limnological theories might apply to their lake.

The whole basis of taxonomy is that there's so much to know that each 
individual can only know a tiny fraction of the whole, but while this 
requires one kind of co-operation, it also requires each individual to 
be an autonomous authority on an idiosyncratic subset of taxa and 
geography. This may mean that the problem with taxonomy is not that 
taxonomists don't work together, but that the enterprise as a whole is 
so co-operative that it doesn't fit a "business model" of top-down 
control. Astronomy and physics have huge machines for gathering data 
that bear on relatively simple theories, and these are much more 
centralized and business-like than individually making, exchanging, 
studying, and publishing on collections.

And, as a corrupting influence, "The example of biological nomenclature, 
which governs the naming of the Earth's biodiversity with minimal 
legislation and little enforcement or jurisprudence, inspires a 
naturalist to believe that autonomous anarchist systems can order large 
enterprises" - http://pinicola.ca/kitchen.htm#banner - which means that 
we have been able to co-operatively do the work of taxonomy while 
appearing fractious and maybe not even liking each other very much - 
providing there's enough funding to keep sponsoring institutions 
operational and to keep bread on the table and to buy insect pins.

fred.
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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 -
http://fragileinheritance.org/projects/thirty/thirtyintro.htm
Daily Paintings - http://karstaddailypaintings.blogspot.com/
     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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