Why Do Taxonomists Write the Meanest Obituaries?
The open nature of the science of classification virtually guarantees fights.
Ever since Darwin gave us a framework for understanding common descent, the search has been on for a natural classification, an arrangement of nested groups, or taxa, that accurately reflects evolutionary relationships. In this scheme, a classification functions as an explicit evolutionary hypothesis—to say that five species form a genus is also to say that those five species share a unique common ancestor. Ditto for families and orders, right up through classes and kingdoms.
.. splitters, who advocate for more and smaller groups, and lumpers, who like their groups big and inclusive.
.. Keeping track of all these names and their shifting histories requires specialists to maintain a near-encyclopedic familiarity with the literature of their group.
.. the Codes generally remain silent on the question of quality: Any taxonomic proposal, no matter how outlandish, ill-informed, or incompetent, counts so long as it was published according to the barest of requirements set out in the Codes themselves.
.. if you can print it and you can distribute it, then you can describe pretty much whatever you want.
.. it also creates a massive loophole for unscrupulous, incompetent, or fringe characters to wreak havoc. That’s because the Principle of Priority binds all taxonomists into a complicated network of interdependence; just because a species description is wrong, poorly conceived, or otherwise inadequate, doesn’t mean that it isn’t a recognized part of taxonomic history. Whereas in physics, say, “unified theories” scrawled on napkins and mailed in unmarked envelopes end up in trashcans, biologists, regardless of their own opinions, are bound to reckon with the legacy of anyone publishing a new name. Taxonomists are more than welcome to deal with (or “revise”) these incorrect names in print, but they can’t really ignore them.
.. As E.D. Merrill, the Harvard botanist who set out to index and correct much of this work in the 1930s and ’40s, put it, “we would have been infinitely better off today had Rafinesque never written or published anything appertaining to the subject.”
.. Makhan’s descriptions are notoriously short on detail. In place of clear scientific diagrams, he illustrates much of his work with blurry, out-of-focus photographs. Most frustrating to fellow entomologists, many of Makhan’s “new” species are instantly recognizable, at least to them, as already described insects. Despite numerous articles and blog posts on the so-called “Makhan problem,” new publications continue to appear, most in a small Australian journal without a traditional peer-review process. (As recently as last year, Makhan described a new species of waterbeetle, Desmopachria barackobamai—named, of course, for the 44th president of the United States.)
.. That’s because the growth of so-called “vanity journals”—publications that look to all appearances like mainstream scientific outlets, but lack rigorous peer-review—has produced new avenues for what some have taken to calling “taxonomic vandalism.” As traditional boundaries between experts and amateurs dissolve in the face of digital publishing, more opportunities than ever exist for novel voices in science, journalism, and politics. Unfortunately, these opportunities come at a cost, as a growing tide of information challenges the discriminatory abilities of scientists and lay readers alike.
.. While discussions underway now could revise the Codes to include stricter controls on which publications count for classificatory changes, many taxonomists are wary of doing anything that might deter amateur contributions. With so many species left to discover, and with existential threats to biodiversity looming, they realize the field needs as much help as it can get.