[Taxacom] Why stability? - Revisited

[Roderic Page]

Hi Nico,

To return to you’re original post and question, a couple of quick comments.

As Stephen Thorpe alluded to, once aspect of instability is IMHO a function of the burden taxonomic names carry. We would like:

1. human readable, globally unique names, that

2. also tell us something about relationships (e.g. the genus name matters), and

3. carry some link to provenance (e.g., taxonomic authority, author for new combinations, etc.)

There’s pretty much no way to satisfy these requirements without tradeoffs of one sort or another. For example, for reasons that I’ve now forgotten I thought it would be fun to try and track down the original species descriptions associated with a recent paper on the declining rate of descriptions of new bird species ( http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/syu069, see also http://eol.org/collections/116394 ). Cue much heartache as many of these names have changed, and often discovering the original name (and publication) is a world of hurt as people shuffle species between genera and up and down between species and subspecies rank (e.g., http://bionames.org/names/cluster/642623 ).

We have a naming system that is hugely unstable because goals 1 and 2 are incompatible (at least, they are in the absence of any system to track name changes, botanists do this quite well, zoologists don’t).

Regarding your bigger point about your “extreme” system, I think this is kind of where we are heading, especially when you think of things like DNA barcoding. However, I suspect that what people will focus on is not the long history of shuffling specimens between names and taxa, but what the latest snap shot is "right now". Databases that make this explicit (GBIF - taxa as sets of occurrences, NCBI and BOLD - taxa as sets of sequences) will be useful and underpin actual research. Databases that make this implicit (i.e., most taxonomic databases) will be a lot less useful.

I love the taxonomic legacy as much as anyone, indeed I spend most of my time trying to expose it as much as possible (hence http://biostor.org and http://bionames.org ), but I suspect a lot of discussion about the relationship between concepts will be of perhaps limited relevance except in some (possibly spectacular) edges cases.

Regards

Rod

---------------------------------------------------------
Roderic Page
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On 28 Apr 2015, at 01:47, Nico Franz <nico.franz at asu.edu<mailto:nico.franz at asu.edu>> wrote:

http://taxonbytes.org/thoughts-why-stability-in-nomenclature-and-at-what-cost/

  I'd be interested in knowing if any scholarly works (I cite Atran)
support this. And other comments.

Cheers, Nico
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