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15 - Further Myths and More Misunderstandings

from Part V - Beyond Classification

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 July 2020

David M. Williams  and
Malte C. Ebach
David M. Williams
Affiliation:
Natural History Museum, London
Malte C. Ebach
Affiliation:
University of New South Wales, Sydney
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Summary

For many, classification is shrouded in mystery and questions such as ‘How do taxonomists find all those species?’ have led philosophers of science to discuss species concepts rather than how taxonomists actually discover natural entities. The same is true for monophyletic taxa in general: much is made of defining monophyletic taxa rather than discovering them. Ask a room full of systematists to define monophyly and there will probably be at least five different definitions (see Vanderlaan et al. 2013). Yet, every single one of those individuals will most likely be able to identify the same monophyletic taxon. All that said, it seems what systematists say they do is often not what they do (sensu Medawar [1967] 1968, epigraph above; see also Winsor 2001), discovering monophyly being a case in point.

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Cladistics
A Guide to Biological Classification
 , pp. 396 - 429
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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References

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Further Reading

Inspiration for this paper was largely as a response to the contributions of Charles Godfray, and while they are not without some merit, his position reflects that of a ‘user’ rather than practitioner (‘Godfray is a user of taxonomic end-products who has frequently been critical of the slowness with which modern taxonomy is furnishing these—especially species names—to ecologists, conservationists, ‘biodiversity scientists’, etc. … Godfray’s criticism, echoed in other circles … is cast in what he has termed the ‘second bioinformatics crisis’, viz. that the alleged lethargy of modern taxonomy is mostly due to the lack of an adequate cyberstructure to disseminate its much needed products’, p. 141). Having noted that, it is worth dipping into some of Godfray’s papers to understand some of the technical possibilities for data storage (e.g., Godfray, HCJ. 2002. Challenges for taxonomy. Nature 417: 17–19; Godfray, HCJ. 2007. Linnaeus in the information age. Nature 446: 259–260; Godfray, HCJ., Mayo, SJ. & Scoble, MJ. Pragmatism and rigour can coexist in taxonomy. Evolutionary Biology 34: 309–311).

In relation to this paper, see: Flowers, RW. 2007. Taxonomy’s unexamined impediment. The Systematist 28: 3–7; Flowers, RW. 2007. Comments on ‘Helping Solve the “Other” Taxonomic Impediment: ‘Completing the Eight Steps to Total Enlightenment and Taxonomic Nirvana’ by Evenhuis (2007). Zootaxa 1494: 67–68 (‘Many taxonomists in my age cohort are now “molecular systematists”, and I know that some of them became so because they saw that funding would be impossible otherwise. If funding became linked to describing new species, you can bet that many would switch back, some reluctantly but others gladly’, p. 68).

A philosopher’s viewpoint. Perhaps if less time was spent agonising over species, progress would be had.

‘Thinking of naming systems as conventions may help clarify what we should be doing, if we are not to squander both the time and the reputation of systematics. Time is in short supply and our reputation not what it might be; solving the less cosmic issues may involve a self-discipline that also seems in short supply in the systematic community’.

This editorial was followed by a series of comments, all worth reading in the context of the future of taxonomy (Science 305: 1104–1107, includes five contributions).

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