Posted by:
wulf
at Thu Dec 18 06:59:15 2003 [ Report Abuse ] [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by wulf ]
Hi folks,
CKing wrote:
I agree that names are unimportant. It is the evidence that counts. If there is little or no evidence for a proposed change or if the change does not do any good (e.g. to satisfy the ideological intolerance of parpahyletic taxa) then the proposal ought to be rejected.
Well, names aren' that important, right. But when it comes to rejecting taxa introduced in papers without any evidence it sure is a bit more complicated.
If the paper (even hardly) meets the recommendations of the code of the ICZN the paper must be seen as "published" and therefore the names are available. Though it is still questionable if these taxa are biological valid entities or not.
You can put them to synonymy, you can revist the taxa and come up with other conclusions, but you can not just ignore them. But on the other hand how can available names and therefore taxa be rejected without subsequent work on these? They can't!
This in my opinion is one of the gaps in the ICZN code, as these rules are easy to come by with but on the other hand there is no quality check. This might have been ok for long time, as usually only professional scientists wrote taxonomic articles, but today everybody can write such a paper introducing new taxa and as long as they stick to the code these will be available if not suppressed by others.
But there should be no acceptance nor apologies for sloppy work or faked analysis, but as this is not checked or overlooked in "amature" journals, every bugger can introduce new taxa at every time without providing evidence. It is therefore my opinion that taxonomic papers should only be accepted in peer-reviewed journals as this grants a certain quality.
my 5 cents...
Cheers,
Wulf
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http://www.leiopython.de ,
http://www.herpers-digest.com
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