Taxacom: A functional compromise (Re: Lepidopteran gender)

[Douglas Yanega]

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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