Taxacom: replacing un-sequenceable types (was Re: Minimalist revision of Mesochorus)

[John Grehan]

To add to Heads' observation, the 'host' range (or more correctly food
sources) of a species is another attribute that is not in the DNA, but a
combination of the DNA (in structural and regulatory genes and epigenetic
feedback), and the particular environment that species comes to occupy,
which is in the first palace a matter of geography. In other words, the
host range is not 'innate' but circumstantial, according to the historical
circumstances of the ancestral range of both the feeder and fed.

When a tyke, not so many years ago (relatively speaking) I learned that
various evolutionists (Mayr for one I think) said that the pre
evolutionary 'essence' of species ascribed by creationists was no longer
valid. But with much of the DNA race, including the barcode metaphor (and a
metaphor is all that it is, but a deliberate one all the same) seems to
have resurrected species as having a unique, singular (never polymorphic)
spatio-temporally unrestricted molecular essence. So, if I read the
molecular experts correctly, the creationists had it right all along :)

John Grehan

On Tue, Sep 5, 2023 at 12:37 PM Jared Bernard via Taxacom <
taxacom at lists.ku.edu> wrote:

> Not only is biogeographical info not in DNA per se, but there are other
> obvious risks of relying entirely on DNA. Clearly there is now a sentiment
> that you can simply blast a barcode against a genetic repository to
> identify something. Arguments about barcoding aside (and there are plenty),
> a lot of stuff on genetic repositories is misidentified (e.g., Meiklejohn
> et al. 2019, doi: 10.1371/ journal.pone.0217084; Fort et al. 2021, doi:
> 10.1111/1755-0998.13453; Cheng et al. 2023, doi:
> 10.3389/fevo.2023.1149839). So, someone who may not be an expert in
> distinguishing species taxonomically has identified their species, and now
> that name is forever associated with that genetic material. So when the
> next user blasts their species' DNA, it comes back with an ID (or rather,
> highest similarity), and that user probably doesn't question it. (Same
> problem with the new AI tools.)
>
> The task of the underappreciated field of taxonomy must therefore be to
> distinguish species morphologically so that any following work, like
> evolutionary relationships or ecology, won't be misapplied to the wrong
> species. I always wonder, given the above emerging data on misidentified
> material on genetic repositories, how many papers on ecology, conservation
> biology, or evolution have misidentified the study subjects. This is the
> problem with the widening disconnect between people studying biodiversity
> and people who can identify the basic units of biodiversity.
>
> And of course, this is aside from the fact that only an infinitesimal
> amount of the world's biodiversity has any sequence in a repository,
> incorrect or not (Kvist 2013, doi: 10.1016/j.ympev.2013.05.012).
>
> If I'm restating an earlier comment, I apologize.
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