To be widely accepted, a taxonomic proposal would probably need to have the following:



1. publicity. No proposal is going to achieve wide spread acceptance unless it is widely known.



2. data. No proposal is going to be accepted unless there is data in support of it.



3. controversy. If there is controversy over a taxnomic proposal, the chance of it being accepted is lessened.



4. authority. A taxonomic proposal is much more likely to be accepted if it is proposed by a well known specialist in the field and/or it is published in a prestigious scientific journal. Conversely, a taxonomic proposal is less likely to be accepted if it is published in a book, a herpetocultural magazine, an amateur herpetological journal (such as one of the regional herpetological society journals) and/or if it is published by, say, a student or an amateur in the field.



5. test of time. If a proposal (even if one that has garnered little support when published) has withstood the test of time, then it is likely to be widely accepted eventually.



6. ideology. A proposal based on ideology is most likely accepted by those who share the same ideology and rejected by those who have a different ideology. For example, taxonomists who split a species because of his/her subscription to the evolutionary species concept will generally find acceptance among adherents to the same concept but rejection by those who subscribe to a different species concept.



7. fashion. A proposal to split taxa, for example, on the basis of phenetic differences is much more likely to be acceptable to most biologists when phenetics was fashionable, as it was during the 1970's. A phenetic classification is much less likely to be accepted today, since cladistics is fashionable.



8. intangibles. Sometimes it is nearly impossible to figure out why one proposal is accepted and why another is rejected.



As to what one can do to influence acceptance of a taxonomic proposal, that is another topic altogether. One can, for instance, ask a friend who is an author of a field guide or checklist to include one's own proposal to give it instant credibility. If a taxonomic change is adopted by a field guide, many readers may believe that this proposal may have strong evidentiary support, or that it has withstood the test of time, or that it was a consensus among the specialists. If that is the case, a proposal that is controversial or unsupported by data may nevertheless become a "fait accompli," even if it may be undone entirely a decade later.

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