[Taxacom] Why Taxonomy does NOT matter

[Jason Mate]

> Just as hard as wrangling your team members will be dealing with incongruence and fitting it within your evolutionary picture. Who does this now? Is there anyone who seriously examines incongruence, instead of dismissing it as noise and an obstacle to discovering the One True Tree?

> Regardless of what group is being studied, what I read in the literature suggests that investigators are looking for evolutionary 'signal' in their data. The 'signal' is regarded as evolution, the rest isn't. This is a very strange idea. Surely *all* the data reflect what's happened during evolution?


One man's noise is another man's data, tt is noise if it doesn't apply to the level you are looking at. When researchers speak of signal and noise I don't think they are making the distinction between good/bad but between useful (to me, now) and ''useless''. I think we all do this but in the case of molecular data you have to deal with the numerous characters which are simply not useful to you particular question.

 From what I have seen and in my limited experience the noise issue is best dealt with through the 
addition of taxa. And here lies a very important contribution that classical taxonomists make. It is much more difficult to get the material than sequencing; hence lab-based research is focused on more data from the same taxa instead of closing gaps. Sometimes ''field'' taxonomists are approached by lab researchers for specimens. Often the specimens are rare, have small distributions, narrow phenologies and very specific ecologies, but the assumption out there is that one can just go to the backyard and pick them up. So the idea that ''modern'' taxonomy doesn't need classical taxonomists is spurious. The simple truth is that we give out our services for free and then are told that our services have no value.

Jason