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Re: PhyloCode: Re: Sereno's (2005) new definitions

----- Original Message ----- From: "Jaime A. Headden" <qilongia@yahoo.com>
Sent: Tuesday, December 27, 2005 4:24 AM

[crossposted to the PhyloCode mailing list for discussuon]

I had written:

<<That would not be a tremendously difficult and problematic issue. Imagine
that Hermann von Meyer has been dead over a century, so someone ELSE will have
to "register" the name FOR him, or do it for themselves.>>

David Marjanovic (david.marjanovic@gmx.at) wrote:

<Er... yes, of course. Where's the problem?>

Imperiosity. It would be required to not only get a name published, but to
get it approved for validity by a system of people (or in fact, a _person_),
whom will choose to do so only via application of the definition. 

I don't understand what you mean. Please explain.

Furthermore, that person (note the singular, as suggested by the dPC's
authors) will determine this process, priority, etc. No recommendation in the
current dPC Article 8 currently involves checks and balances.

That's true, and it's one of the reasons for my proposal to greatly complicate the meaning of "January 1, 200n".

The authorship, timing, and relegation of
database nomenclature, for example, could become easily out of sync with the
publication record, simply because of this process; 

I don't understand.

I might take this further, by arguing that the application of the registrar
and registrator require paper trails, at least digitally, but the purpose of
these has no legitimate, simply legalistic, purpose, for the sake of
publication. Their existence seems superfluous. 

"They" is the paper trails?

Yet aside from this, Art. 8 of
the dPC considers (and elsewhere advocates that) names not validated in this
database are not valid, whether published or not. This leads to issues of
synonymy, for when names ARE registered, they can cause a distruption in the
historical record and their argument of precedence as has been historically
recognized by the ICBN and ICZN, such as (close to home, perhaps) finding its
popularity warranting of *Brontosaurus* Marsh, 1879 over *Apatosaurus* Marsh,
1877, or *crassipes* von Meyer, 1857 over *lithographica* von Meyer, 1861.

In these two cases, at the very least, we can be reasonably certain that the most widely used names (*Apatosaurus* and *lithographica*) would be converted first. If (which I can hardly imagine) someone with malicious intentions would do otherwise, it would cause quite an uproar, and very soon someone would petition the CPN to overturn these cases, which it would certainly do.

However, I think we can easily add something along the lines of the following to the draft PhyloCode:

----------------------------------------------------
Rule: Names that are objectively invalid under the preexisting codes (unconserved junior homonyms, unconserved junior objective [ICZN]/nomenclatural [ICBN] synonyms, nomina oblita, names suppressed by conservation) must not be converted.

Recommendation: Names that are widely considered subjectively invalid under the preexisting codes (unconserved junior subjective [ICZN]/taxonomic [ICBN] synonyms) should not be converted.
----------------------------------------------------

What do you think?

Issues of priority would either have to be rewritten, or some names, despite
their existence, simply ignored or forgotten. I have suggested, perhaps not
here, that a direct transposition of the current ICZN taxonomic Nomina
Conservanda and such be adopted, simply to avoid this, and all names currently
held valid be considered valid by the dPC officiators. This seems to have been
met with silence.

Well, nothing is valid if it isn't registered, and nothing can be registered that doesn't have a definition. A wholesale conversion of all nomina conservanda cannot happen for this reason; we will have to wait for someone defining any of them. We can't convert names that don't belong to a clade.

Only new names would have to undergo the registration
process,

All names will be new in the sense that they will receive a valid definition _for the first time_ on or after "January 1, 200n".

thereby avoiding the issue of trying to register names out of current
sequence based on some person's personal idealism about what names are better
than others (on that person's OWN considerations). 

My proposal does the same -- doesn't it?

<Well, either you discuss that with her, ideally resulting in a coauthored
publication.>

I have discussed this with Dr. Clarke. The results of that discussion are not
public, so I will not air them here. However, the issue of coauthoring in any
case is a problematic area I touched on before: most systematists are out there
working on their own phylogenies, and many will reject the ideas of others
based on their personal view points.

In principle this is no problem -- just word the definitions carefully enough that they work under all of those phylogenies (respectively self-destruct under phylogenies under which their contents would change too drastically).

There are taxonomic "cliques" (in American
parlance) as much as there are those who are "lone wolves" (more parlance,
going about their own way and rejecting community efforts). That said, there
are some who gather large groups to compound ideas and form real communal
efforts on taxonomy, but these are the exception, not the rule. 

My proposal includes giving great support to large community efforts.

The tendency
for few specialists in research position dealing in major inter-taxon
systematics (and thus those more prone to reviewing and revising such taxonomy)
tends to cause some, such as latter days' Steel or Gray, to revise swaths of
nomenclature on their own prerogative, or Seeley, often without much as a "by
your leave" and often getting into nomenclature wars. There was in fact a minor
"war" between Joel Cracraft [at the AMNH] and Storrs Olson [at the Smithsonian]
involved in "order-based" avian systematics that eventually led to Cracraft in
rejecting the ranks in favor of the then imminent Sibley and Alqvist, whose
work was also, while lauded, largely rejected by order-based systematists,
including Alan Feduccia. If even these leading researchers couldn't agree on
the nature of systematics, how should we get them, or me and those who disagree
with me or I with them, into a single paper together?

Most likely we won't get those people to help who think that hardly anyone, including themselves, will ever use the PhyloCode. But to get those who think it won't go the way of the BioCode should be relatively easy. Everyone profits if everyone uses the same names for about the same groups, even if they use different codes to regulate those names.

Today, we have a system founded on ranks, but
surprisingly, a lot of the arguments of precedence and foundation can be found
in the dPC, which honors its forbearers' insight. But while rank-based practice
in the ICZN and ICBN are deeply entrenched, they are not so innate as to render
their removal destructive, simply by revising the elements that refer to ranks,
and allowing all suprageneric names to be establishable as clades, and have
provisions for definitional addenda to the establishment of names, will cause
more ease I think than many people realize.

I disagree. Mesozoic dinosaur genera behave very well; apart from the occasional splitting or lumping of genera that are thought to be sister-groups, they remain stable except for the rare cases that a newly discovered species does not get a genus name of its own, and almost all contain a single known species. If you look into the plants or frogs, for example, horror will stare in your face. Genera containing "sections" containing subgenera containing 3/4-official "species groups" containing a dozen species each... It would make some sense to cut off the nomenclature of some taxa above the genus level, but for others this is the "species group" level, while for yet others the subgenus level would be appropriate. There are simply too many different traditions to make such a thing work.

<My proposal is maybe 10 years -- plus some pressure so that the discussion
actually happens!>

...

<This may not be the right day to say it, but I don't think any of the
rank-based codes can be saved... sorry for the pun.>

People are human, and whatever our pure-minded motives, names have a property
value, signified by the authorship. They will fight over their property, as
much as they should, since it in the end signifies their scientific
acheivements and establishes their history. Many, such as Dobzhansky, or Lyell,
have been able to establish their names through works of LOGIC and observation
without having to resort to scientific names, but I dare say many of us now are
tied to our names and find it important to hold on them, since they usually
indicate we will be working on those areas for decades to come. 

This is why I suggest to promote big community efforts.

In fact, after a decade of de Queiroz and
Gauthier publishing on the abandonment of ranks,


(In journals that were, at that time, the insider bulletins

we come back to researchers
who use the Linnaean system and yet offer definitions,


Who, for example? Has Benton started publishing explicit definitions?

consider parts of the ICZN perhaps more suggestive than enforcing, 

Benton :-)

To get the [I]CZN to agree, of course, is going
to be HARD work, and it requires a compounding response in the biological
community. This will take DECADES (yah, pessimistically).

Why bother? We don't need it.