Taxacom: A functional compromise (Re: Lepidopteran gender)

[Fernandez, Jose]

Hi Doug and everyone,

I apologize for the delay in replying to Doug's email from January 27 (copy below). Please notice that my present reply is NOT about the most recent (and currently ongoing) debate on the gender of scientific names, which is itself another interesting topic to debate. Rather, I am referring here to the proposal/suggestion from Doug about implementing a Registry which would be (in his own words) " built by the consensus of groups of experts in specific disciplines - but is maintained in *real time*, *online*, and plainly displays *all the relevant parameters for each registered name*.

I did not see much commenting on that, and I would like to bring back the subject to the attention of the taxonomic community, as indeed it would help solving (or at least it would facilitate) many/most of the name-related problems that we have been debating in this list lately. 

A couple of years ago I had a similar but private exchange of emails with Doug (at the time he was kindly helping me to check for some names of a world checklist I was preparing about the Braconidae subfamily Microgastrinae), and then he mentioned to me his idea of this "registry" built by consensus and by experts on specific disciplines. By the time my paper came out in ZooKeys, in March 2020 (https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fzookeys.pensoft.net%2Farticle%2F39128%2F&data=04%7C01%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7C1436df89b9274d73f5d708d9eb1fa47e%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C637799343404770045%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000&sdata=4g604jq8D%2BlGxDC4CPvvgmsKmWGjdt6kRduDkNGKPhs%3D&reserved=0) , I was hoping it would work in that sense for that subfamily, as the paper included a couple of Excel files with all names and info that (I thought!) could facilitate the easy retrieval of data by any interested bioinformatician. The 1,000+ pages paper dealt with around 3,000 valid names, around 3,500 names in total, including more than 300 new combinations and a complete updates of the subfamily at world level and on many subjects... I was naively expecting that such paper would be discussed here more (in that sense of working as a registry for that subfamily), but instead it was mildly criticized in this Taxacom list by some because "not all of the references cited in the paper had been presented with its associated doi"... [There are always people in this list that focus on the negative of everything]. At the time, the covid pandemic had started and I even lost access to my work email for several weeks due to the fist of many lockdowns, so when I finally could read the comments in Taxapad it was already too late to reply to those comments... But I am bringing the topic again not necessarily to talk about my paper (although I use it as an example), but rather to discuss again this proposal from Doug because I see its great potential value.

For many taxonomic groups it is already possible to establish that kind of collaboration and partnership (for some other groups there are, admittedly, different factions and there it could be more challenging). The main problem I see is how to implement such registry and how to facilitate updating the data there. Going back to my paper mentioned above, Pensoft allows for published papers to have a "Comment" section, which is kept online. I placed some updates there (about new species being described in the subfamily after the paper had been published), and I even received some valid suggestions and corrections from other colleagues. But I am not sure that this is the best way to proceed. So, I am already working on another paper with some updates/corrections/changes to the original 2020 paper. This is pretty much what any taxonomist has been doing with her/his group, but I would love to see the possibility of some registry being built to accommodate such world checklists/catalogues, and that the world community working on specific taxa could contribute there, and debate on such taxa, and the information would be accessible in real time for anyone interested.

Many of the most vocal contributors to the Taxacom list have been working on similar initiatives for the past few years. But at times it seems to me that we are all pulling towards our own directions, but we seldom try to organize such efforts into something truly global. I find many posts in Taxacom to contain very valuable ideas and suggestions, but I would very much like to see more fruits to materialize from our email discussions here. One nice example (not at all related to the topic at hand) on how Taxacom email exchanges translated into "something" was the paper " Taxonomy based on science is necessary for global conservation (https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdoi.org%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.2005075&data=04%7C01%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7C1436df89b9274d73f5d708d9eb1fa47e%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C637799343404770045%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000&sdata=EoUodQ283%2Bu6vXOyGYMwrHH5I46IvkeAS3WE4hknr7Q%3D&reserved=0)", which was a direct product after Taxacom discussions on a previous paper. 

I wish that the proposal made by Doug would be considered more seriously by us here and perhaps we could get something done in that regard? Or am I being too naïve or optimistic?
 
Cheers,
Jose

--
José L. Fernández-Triana, Ph.D.
Research Scientist, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
Canadian National Collection of Insects (CNC) 
960 Carling Avenue, Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 0C6, CANADA 
Phone: 613-759-1034. Email: jose.fernandez at canada.ca 
Alternative email : cnc.braconidae at gmail.com
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Taxacom <taxacom-bounces at lists.ku.edu> On Behalf Of Douglas Yanega via Taxacom
Sent: January 27, 2022 2:17 PM
To: taxacom at lists.ku.edu
Subject: Taxacom: A functional compromise (Re: Lepidopteran gender)

Many of you on this list will recall that in the past I have repeatedly
- and fairly passionately - proposed that we should move forward on one of the options available to us, as a community, that would allow us to retain gender agreement where it IS used, maintain its absence where it is NOT used, AND greatly facilitate the adherence to the Code's rules for those in the community who are not, nor wish to be, constantly digging into Latin and Greek dictionaries just to figure out how names should be spelled.

It's called a Registry, and it would be similar in many ways to ZooBank. 
We have one now, though it is rarely used and rarely discussed, and that is the LAN ("List of Accepted Names"), spelled out in some detail in Article 79 of the Code. It operates via the consensus of a large number of taxonomists working on a single well-defined taxonomic group, which is a good principle, endorsed by the Commission.

In its present form, the LAN can serve many functions, including permanently fixing the epithets of an entire taxonomic group as nouns, if that is the consensus desire. Frank Krell and I gave a presentation to the International Lepidopterists Society some years ago, where we pointed this out as an option that would allow current practice to be maintained while also adhering to the Code.

The LAN mechanism as presently incarnated in Article 79 is, unfortunately, very unwieldy and glacially slow. It does not operate in real time, most of all, and that in and of itself is a *serious* limitation, when new names are being published all the time. Even the most ambitious efforts would still mean 5-year delays between revisions of the LAN (the process from submission to taking effect requires ~5 years), and a minimum 10-year lag between when a name is published, and when it could be finally incorporated (see Art. 79.2.2.4).

What I have repeatedly proposed, and garnered some support for at various times, is that we develop a Registry that functions in a similar manner to the LAN - built by the consensus of groups of experts in specific disciplines - but is maintained in *real time*, *online*, and plainly displays *all the relevant parameters for each registered name*. 
That includes things like the original description (linked to an online copy, if possible), the officially agreed-upon date and authorship, the type species of each genus, the type specimen(s) of each species, the officially agreed-upon original spelling, the officially agreed-upon gender of each genus name, the officially agreed-upon determination as to whether a species name is a declinable adjective or not, and anything else that is needed. Some of these would be novel additions, and some of the desired features are already built into ZooBank, and some of the desired features are already built into the LAN, but what we really need is essentially a hybrid of the two.

I would like people to consider the following scenario, and how it is dealt with under the status quo, versus the model I have been proposing:

A taxonomist, revising the masculine genus Hypotheticus, has several species to contend with that don't actually belong in that genus:

bilophus, dilophus, erinaceus, euryalus, grandior, imperator, porcellus, pumilus, sagittarius, secalis, striatus, and viduus.

The taxonomist is considering creating a new generic name for these species, maybe feminine, or maybe neuter, but not masculine.

Under the status quo, that taxonomist is *left to their own devices* in terms of determining which of these names will have to change spelling, and how, to accommodate a different gender of the generic name with which they are combined. NO WONDER SO MANY PEOPLE HATE GENDER AGREEMENT.

*Forcing people to do their own research* is a guaranteed way to foster both instability (because different people can, and often will, come to
*different* conclusions) AND resentment.

We can remove this problem if names are all in a Registry that TELLS taxonomists whether they are declinable adjectives or not. Establishing such a Registry is easier than you think, as is determining what epithets are declinable. I will point out that I have personally screened over 200,000 valid names to date, and 49% are *definitively* declinable adjectives (with no room for dispute under the Code), 43% are definitively non-declinable, and only 8% are subject to dispute, and would require research or debate to resolve. That means that roughly 92% of all published names can be resolved by an automated algorithm linked to a lexicon. Making such a tool available to taxonomists will largely eliminate the burden that gender agreement presently entails. For every one million published names, therefore, we can extrapolate that there are only 80,000 names that would need to be researched (and, once researched, could be permanently Registered). That's *manageable*.

Enterprising scholars among you might have tried their hand at the example I gave. It's not simple. I can say that of the 12 names, only 2 are definitively declinable adjectives; 3 more are names that can be either nouns or adjectives (according to appropriate dictionaries), so knowing which is correct requires examining the original descriptions (Art. 31.2.2); 2 more are names that do not appear in dictionaries, and some taxonomists will insist are adjectives, and other taxonomists will insist are nouns. The other 5 are definitively *not* declinable under the Code.

Wouldn't it be nice if no one ever had to look that stuff up again,
*except* in a Registry that gives a clear and definitive answer, or using a tool that tells them how to treat a name over 90% of the time? 
Again, if all the epithets in Lepidoptera that are considered fixed appear in the Registry *as nouns*, put there by consensus and accepted by the Commission, then we would have a functional compromise. We could stop the debate, and get on with our business - and we would still have gender agreement for all the other taxonomic disciplines, and THAT could be largely automated.

If this appeals to you, then let those of us on the Commission know. 
Mobilize experts in your disciplines, and build consensus lists. Change rarely comes unless people demand it.

Sincerely,

-- 
Doug Yanega      Dept. of Entomology       Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314     skype: dyanega
phone: (951) 827-4315 (disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
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