Taxacom: Minimalist revision and evolution

[Richard Zander]

It appears to me that there is another kind of minimalism inherent in this thread. It is speciesism. A relentless focus on the species taxonomic level avoids a responsibility we have to the biodiversity crisis, namely that aspect of our work in taxonomy that may help understand processes of extinction and adaptation, and identify those taxa that are potentially safe or sorry. 

A way of doing taxonomy that requires the detailing of  trait changes associated with adaptation or at least semi-neutral change is detailed in my (free) recent book 
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This a maximum likelihood method using morphological trait changes between ancestral species and descendant species in a monothetic genus or subgenus (one ancestor). It requires evaluation of trait changes between species in ancestor-descendant pairs, which is then information on resilience and survival across periods of climate perturbation. Certain genera of West Indian mosses, e.g., are clearly adapted (in expressed traits) for survival of hurricanes in about five different ways.

Our present way of doing taxonomy is able to ignore describing ancestor-descendant evolutionary relationships. Cladistics avoids saying which species are ancestral species, although Van Valen in 1973 pointed our that extant ancestral species are common. Ignoring the critical informational role of ancestral species is a blind spot in all modern taxonomic methods (or ideologies).

I give evidence that genera and species are trained across geological time spans for survival of climate change. They are not trained to survive the kind of natural selection begun in the mid-1960's with the crowding and harrowing of the Anthropocene. Nature is now red in tooth, claw, war, famine, disease, and the pure behavioral human sink.

It is possible that in 30,000 to 300,000 years a post-human, post-chimp, post-gorilla, or post-orangutan might think well of us if we taxonomists treat genera as basic elements of evolution, and give our hominoid lineage our best attempts at long-term protection.

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Richard H. Zander
Missouri Botanical Garden – 4344 Shaw Blvd. – St. Louis – Missouri – 63110 – USA
richard.zander at mobot.org Ofc: +1 314 577-0276
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