Taxonomy, the fading field 2 Jun 2009 A very nice piece in The Scientist (free registration) points out how traditional taxonomy is being replaced by the sexier molecular techniques (no mention of barcoding), and how this means that important connections between species are being missed, as they rapidly disappear. Species and systematics Systematics
Evolution Contingency, not-quite-asexuals, and phylogeny of continuous characters 4 Jun 2008 This is a kind of scattered post on a few things that have caught my eye, while I am avoiding boring work. Paeloblog reports that a paper in Nature has done a phylogeny on continuous rather than discrete characters, using morphometric criteria to do a hominin phylogeny. This is not… Read More
Biology The second in the series “Species and Systematics” 1 Aug 2009 Readers know my book is the first cab off the rank known as “Species and Systematics” at the University of California Press. It was too good to last that I would be the only one. Now Parenti and Ebach have published their Comparative Biogeography as the second volume. They have… Read More
Evolution Myth 6: Darwin thought everything was due to natural selection 4 Mar 200918 Sep 2017 Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, according to Daniel Dennett in the book by that name, is natural selection. This is often referred to as “Darwin’s theory”. But Darwin did not always think evolutionary events or processes were due to natural selection. Read More
But – is taxonomy being split into multiple subfields, or lumped in with other disciplines to become a superfield?
What seems to be happening is that taxonomy is dying as it is being overrun by one aspect of taxonomy, the molecular, to the detriment of field and museum taxonomy, for which there is no funding nor appreciable credit given. But without those aspects of taxonomic description and investigation, ecology, evolution and various other aspects that are fundamental to biology itself are incomprehensible. So we are seeing a major problem in the way biological research is being funded. One point that I find most intriguing here is that old-school taxonomy is alive and well in India, South and Latin America, and to a lesser extent in the Russian Federation. However, these tend to be local projects, so while the work done is of a good quality, it means large parts of the earth are presently not being well studied.