WW wrote:

"The problem with all this is that the types for these old names are no longer traceable, the descriptions are minimal (as was customary in those days), and there is no accurate type locality info, which makes assigning all these old anmes floating around the literature to any particular taxon a difficult undertaking."

That is not the only problem. As all biologists should know, taxonomic stability is so important that zoologists have decided to establish an organization, namely the ICZN, the sole purpose of which is to promote taxonomic stability. As PK Tubbs noted, "The Code must provide stability and yet adapt to the changes required by advances in biological knowledge and also by what may be described as cultural evolution, such as the shift in emphasis towards usage at the expense of overriding adherence to classical grammar or to the priority of the oldest (even if forgotten) name for a taxon."

Perversely, some zoologists are using a straight application of the rules of the ICZN to destabilize taxonomy!

Pritchard (1994) wrote: "The preparation of a cladogram is nonetheless reminiscent of one of my own favorite pursuits in biology, that of the careful application of a set of arbitrary rules to the creation of a work of art known as a Synonymy. There is joy in the patient application of the Rules of Priority, the rejection of non-binomial forms; the careful identification of nomina nuda, nomina oblita, nomina rejecta, nomina conservanda, and others; the smoking-out of ever-older, more obscure, and more inaccurate works of the past; the delight in discovering a century-old typographical error; the terse and standardized abbreviation of the titles of ancient works so rare that even few libraries have them, as if they were in everyone’s household, on every coffee table; the triumphant declaration that the name everyone has used for the last century must now be challenged by a completely unfamiliar earlier one, or even better, a new one; above all, the labored and loving cataloging of ancient mistakes, for that is what a synonymy is--a literal and chronological catalog of errors, with one tentative line of truth somewhere at the beginning, middle, or end of the structure. It is fun to formulate such things, and you need to know your group and its literature well to do it well, and it is certainly scholarship. But it is not really science, and the things it regards as important, whether they be old publications or old specimens, generate no special insight into objective biology. A holotype, for example, is only important because we have decided that it is important--it was probably a thoroughly undistinguished representative of its taxon, or (even worse) may even have been unrepresentative or atypical.

The saving grace of a synonymy is its lack of pretention. It undertakes only to follow the Rules and to research the literature in cataloging man’s historical errors, his slow footsteps towards truth. Moreover, the true systematics scholar can use the Rules, not to change well-established names, but to find legitimate reasons why such names should be retained despite the challenge that more obscure or less-used names seem to present.

But a cladogram is more sinister--it claims insight into biological and historical reality, even convergence upon absolute truth, although the little problem of multiple equally parsimonious cladograms nixes any claim of actual representation of absolute truth. Yet it too is simply the product of the application of far from-absolute rules. Strange that competing cladograms for the same groups of organisms, presented as showing progressive or asymptotic approach to objective reality, show so much more diversity than do even the most elaborate independent synonymies for the same species! Strange--or perhaps not so strange-is that those ultimate guardians of biodiversity and evolutionary evidence, the curators of natural history museums, are amongst the last to respond to cladistic hypotheses with enough conviction to cause them to relabel their stock, or even the doors of their cabinets. Perhaps it is just a manpower shortage, or perhaps experience has taught them to wait for the dust to settle, which inevitably happens literally, but rarely figuratively."

Not surprisingly, practicing cladists are most often the source of both these types of causes of taxonomic instability: the "discovery" of old, long forgotten names and cladistic analysis.

Indeed, the true systematics scholar should find ways to suppress the old, long forgotten names in order to preserve taxonomic stability. The true systematics scholar should also know that the cladogram is not an approximation of absolute truth, but a hypothesis of relationships that is based on a set of arbitrarily chosen characters that are also arbitrarily weighted by the individual cladist.

Reference:

Pritchard, P.C.H. 1994 Cladism: The Great Delusion. Herpetol. Rev. 25(3):103-110

Tubbs, P. K. 1991 The International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature: What it is and how it operates. Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature 48:295-299

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