[Taxacom] Why Taxonomy does NOT matter

[Stephen Thorpe]

but Bob, full-evidence projects are not feasible in many cases, due to the 
difficulty in obtaining fresh material for molecular work, and/or the lack of 
associated immature stages, etc. Waiting for all of that could take forever. The 
reality is that taxonomy often must proceed on a limited amount of old adult 
material in museum collections. So, we need taxonomists to work independently 
from molecular systematists, etc...

Stephen




________________________________
From: Bob Mesibov <mesibov at southcom.com.au>
To: Stephen Thorpe <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz>
Cc: TAXACOM <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>
Sent: Sat, 23 April, 2011 4:56:04 PM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Why Taxonomy does NOT matter

The money goes to, and the work gets done, by real people, so I prefer to follow 
the money at that level, rather than think about taxonomy in the abstract. 
Matter of taste...

And I'm just as annoyed as you are at seeing molecular studies which aren't 
followed up by solid taxonomy sensu Thorpe. Now that would make an interesting 
project: sample a few hundred of those 'we-found-cryptic-species' papers from, 
say, 2000-2005, to see how many of those molecular suspicions got translated 
into Code-compliant names. Excluding, of course, those largely useless papers 
(some flagged here on Taxacom) in which the molecular characters *alone* were 
used to diagnose the new species.

But from the point of view of you and I as individual taxonomists,is there a 
whole lot of difference between a drawerful of pinned undescribeds and a 
molecular cladogram with 'deep' divisions separating dubiously named terminals? 
They both represent work to be done by us or other taxonomists, part of the 
world's gigantic Biodiversity Backlog.

The 'hybrid solution', which (from what you write) seems to be missing in NZ, 
would be to get funding for multi-investigator projects that look at *all* the 
available material for a taxon, and generate solid Linnean taxonomy, plausibly 
inferred relationships from morphological and molecular data, and freely 
available online outputs (Donat?). If that sounds familiar, it's what the 
Planetary Biodiversity Inventories 
(http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=103065) aim for.

The sad truth is that there isn't a hope of getting PBI-style coverage for 
anything but a miniscule proportion of Life. Which is why morphotaxonomists like 
me plod along genus by genus on no or very little public funding, and why 
molecular phylogeneticists live from short-term grant to grant, and why both 
groups raise skeptical eyebrows at all the noise coming from the acronyms.
-- 
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