[Taxacom] [iczn-list] GENERAL CALL TO BATTLE

[Richard Pyle]

Hi Carlos,

 

I sympathize where you are coming from on this.  My only concern is that you seem a bit too confident that your position is the “right” one.  Passion is a wonderful thing – almost all of my successes in life can be credited to my own passion for various things.  However, sometimes passion can be blinding – leading to a kind of self-righteousness that can ultimately cause more harm than good.   Allusions to what has happened in the U.S. over the past 4 years (not just January 6 of this year) are, in my view, an apt metaphor.  Don’t follow the lead of the U.S. – rather, learn from its mistakes (for the record, I was born and raised in Hawaii, and my family roots here go back four generations, long before these islands were a U.S. State, so even though I am certainly a part of the U.S., I am also in some ways apart from it).

 

Anyway, I already said what I wanted to say in my last post.  But on this particular issue, which I’ve been actively involved with since the earliest days of DNA sequencing, even before Paul Herbert launched his “crusade” for barcodes, I feel confident in asserting what has become a very notorious statement in another context: There are very good people on both sides.

 

Aloha,

Rich

 

Richard L. Pyle, PhD
Senior Curator of Ichthyology | Director of XCoRE

Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum

1525 Bernice Street, Honolulu, HI 96817-2704

Office: (808) 848-4115;  Fax: (808) 847-8252

eMail: deepreef at bishopmuseum.org

 <http://hbs.bishopmuseum.org/staff/pylerichard.html> BishopMuseum.org

Our Mission: Bishop Museum inspires our community and visitors through the exploration and celebration of the extraordinary history, culture, and environment of Hawaiʻi and the Pacific.

 

From: iczn-list <iczn-list-bounces at afriherp.org> On Behalf Of Admin Admin
Sent: Wednesday, February 10, 2021 10:28 AM
To: Scott Thomson <scott.thomson321 at gmail.com>
Cc: Thomas Pape <tpape at snm.ku.dk>; Taxacom <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>; iczn-list at afriherp.org
Subject: Re: [iczn-list] GENERAL CALL TO BATTLE

 

Dear Scott,

I am 100% with you, for the paper. I am also 100% up if you, Rich and/or someone else more experienced leads the paper. I am leading something different: a battle cry. We already discussed the paper by Meierotto et al. (2019) in Taxacom and nothing happened. There was a reply paper to Meierotto et al. (2019) by Zamani et al. (2020), my colleagues, from which I refrained to participate, and nothing happened. Now we found ourselves with Sharkey et al. (2021), who did it again, who introduced additional fallacies, and who threatened to do it again. They are acting from a position of power, technology, "modernism", numbers, logical fallacies, and more. 

I am not going to risk that nothing happens again. We have already given alternatives for years and they have refused to hear those alternatives. Some molecular geneticists want the validity that our primarily morphological system gives, without doing the job, and they are willing to wipe off priority from others who did or are doing that job. My reply without filters: Not in my watch. Let's reach this agreement: We will be all conciliatory, diplomatic, and intransigent with letting fallacies to be published that you and others may want, in the paper. And you will let me carry the weight of those authors in question not wanting to work with me, and you will let me lead this battle cry, so that something actually happens.

I am not going to sit and see how logical fallacies of novelty continue to be published, and I am not going to sit and see how 250+ years of morphological taxonomy are overwritten and not integrated. Again, sorry, I have no filters for this battle, not this time. There is too much to lose.

I will also highlight that we are not talking about governance here, and about imposing one hypothesis (a classification) over all others. Many aggregators already handle multiple alternative classifications and we agreed that there will be no governance over those hypotheses. I maintain a classification myself in Myriatrix, and I have already pointed out elsewhere that Myriatrix classification should peacefully coexist with other classifications. What we are talking about here is about overwriting one system of nomenclature with another system of nomenclature. If we fail to stop that, there will come the division that you fear, to an extent that will make the Code crack with the weight of our own failure.

I hope that we can work together in the reply to Sharkey et al (2021) and to Meierotto et al (2019).

Kind regards,

Carlos