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 The Essentialism Story 22 Aug 2007 Historian Mary P. Winsor published recently (2006b, in the December 2006 edition, but it just came out) a paper discussing how the Essentialism Story was constructed by Arthur Cain, Ernst Mayr, and David Hull. The Essentialism Story is the claim that before Darwin systematists and biologists in general treated natural… Read More
Evolution New work on speciation 5 Aug 2008 Just lately there’s been a flurry of papers on speciation that I haven’t had time to digest properly. Several of them seem to support “sympatric” or localised speciation based on selection for local resources with reproductive isolation a side effect of divergent selection. So here they are below the fold… Read More
Evolution William Smellie on the great chain of being 2 Mar 2009 William Smellie wrote The Philosophy of Natural History in 1791, and it remained in print for over a century. It’s a lovely and explicit expression of the Great Chain of Being view that all things grade insensibly from simple to perfect, and all classifications are arbitrary. This was effectively the… 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.