[Taxacom] Does the species name have to change when it movesgenus?
Stephen Thorpe
stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz
Mon Jun 18 17:58:30 CDT 2012
we should, I suggest, bear in mind that original combinations are very nearly unique identifiers for nominal species (the amount of homonymy must surely only be about 1% ?) The few homonyms can be dealt with using new replacement names (though it is a moot point if we need to replace primary homonyms in (subjective) synonymy?)
Given the considerations above, I am not convinced that LSIDs are worth bothering with ...
Stephen
________________________________
From: Chris Thompson <xelaalex at cox.net>
To: Roderic Page <r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk>; Frederick W. Schueler <bckcdb at istar.ca>
Cc: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Sent: Tuesday, 19 June 2012 9:28 AM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Does the species name have to change when it movesgenus?
Sorry, Rod,
BUT it is TRADITION that rules.
I was on the editorial committee (and for a while the Chair of it) of the
4th Edition of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature back in the
mid 1990s.
I proposed two changes:
1) We abandon "gender agreement" for species epithet and instead use the
ORIGINAL ending.
2) We require that all valid names must have UNIQUE original combinations
(that is, the original combination could not be an homonym).
As you realize that these two small changes would guarantee an unique key
for every valid species regardless of its current combination.
Unfortunately, the traditionalists on the committee (mainly Phil Tubbs and
Otto Kraus) killed those ideas. And today there are commissioners who want
to preserve "gender agreement," etc.
The point is that a couple of small changes would have adapted the
traditional ICZN to the modern computer world. BUT NO, the traditionalists
refused to change. So, instead we are going to get ZooBANK with
B26AB2A6-972F-4A18-9D1D-486A980CF80F E9541A64-EC44-4856-B2AB-B4E8400358F8 &
1FDB5781-C8A0-4088-8D18-DCD5BB01C548 for our unique name! [or in the old
fashion system, Rhopalopsole exigupspira Du & Qian]
Oh, well ...
Chris
Chris Thompson
-----Original Message-----
From: Roderic Page
Sent: Monday, June 18, 2012 3:51 PM
To: Frederick W. Schueler
Cc: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Does the species name have to change when it
movesgenus?
Tradition doesn't seem a terribly compelling argument. Note that I'm not
arguing for uninomial nomenclature, just that we don't muck with the names
once we've coined them.
Regards
Rod
On 18 Jun 2012, at 19:57, Frederick W. Schueler wrote:
> On 6/18/2012 2:18 PM, Roderic Page wrote:
>> OK, I know this is what we do, but my question is "why do we do this?"
>
> * "Tradition." I think there was a song about this.
>
> Uninominal nomenclature has been proposed...
>
> Schueler, Frederick W., and James D. Rising. 1972. The stability of
> A.O.U. Checklist names for North American birds, and uninominal
> nomenclature. 26th Ontario Universities Biological Conference, Toronto.
> Published as: Rising, James D., and Frederick W. Schueler. 1972. How
> stable is binominal nomenclature? Systematic Zoology 21:438-439.
>
> ...the first revisor puts a hyphen between the genus and species names,
> and from then that hyphenated name is tied to the type of the binominal
> name it was formed from, and it doesn't change.
>
> This never caught on, and I think the reason is the offense that's given
> by the mismatch between the generic name in the name (so to speak), and
> the different genus the species may be assigned to.
>
> fred.
> ===========================================
>>
>> As names change over time it becomes a major challenge to find everything
>> published about a taxon. Some groups, such as frogs, are especially prone
>> to name changes as their classification is unstable. Frogs have a pretty
>> good online database detailing name changes, but most animal groups lack
>> this, leaving people like me floundering around trying to make sense of
>> multiple names why may or may not be for the same thing.
>>
>> It seems to me that names should be unique and stable. We don't change
>> the name of a species called "africanus" if we discover that the specimen
>> locality was actually from Australia, nor do we change the name "maximus"
>> if we subsequently discover a bigger species. But we do if we move it to
>> a new genus. Why?
>>
>> Presumably it's because we like the idea of being able to interpret the
>> name - two members of the same genus are presumably more closely related
>> to each other than to a species in a different genus. But demonstrably
>> that is often untrue (otherwise we wouldn't have all the name changes due
>> to moving species to different genera), and we've learnt not to interpret
>> the name literally when inferring any biological attributes, so why the
>> desire to have the name match some current notion of classification? Why
>> not simply accept that we can't infer relationships from the name?
>>
>> It seems to be that if we simply stopped trying to make names reflect
>> classification, at a stroke we'd remove perhaps the primary cause of
>> nomenclatural instability. For example, the recent case of Drosophila
>> melanogaster would be a non-issue. It's "Drosophila melanogaster"
>> regardles sof whether it's nested in the part of the fly tree that
>> includes Sophophora. The relationships of the taxon would have no bearing
>> on its name.
>>
>> Discuss.
>>
>> ---------------------------------------------------------
>> Roderic Page
>> Professor of Taxonomy
>> Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine
>> College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences
>> Graham Kerr Building
>> University of Glasgow
>> Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
>>
>> Email: r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
>> Tel: +44 141 330 4778
>> Fax: +44 141 330 2792
>> Skype: rdmpage
>> AIM: rodpage1962 at aim.com
>> Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192
>> Twitter: http://twitter.com/rdmpage
>> Blog: http://iphylo.blogspot.com/
>> Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html
>>
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>>
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>
>
> --
>
> fred
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Frederick W. Schueler & Aleta Karstad
> Bishops Mills Natural History Centre - http://pinicola.ca/bmnhc.htm
> Mudpuppy Night in Oxford Mills - http://pinicola.ca/mudpup1.htm
> Daily Paintings - http://karstaddailypaintings.blogspot.com/
> South Nation Basin Art & Science Book
> http://pinicola.ca/books/SNR_book.htm
> 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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>
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---------------------------------------------------------
Roderic Page
Professor of Taxonomy
Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine
College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
Email: r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
Tel: +44 141 330 4778
Fax: +44 141 330 2792
Skype: rdmpage
AIM: rodpage1962 at aim.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192
Twitter: http://twitter.com/rdmpage
Blog: http://iphylo.blogspot.com/
Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html
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