Hello folk,

reading the later dicussion between CKing and Richard Wells in the privious thread "Pogona" I would like to ask for comments on what makes a relieable taxonomic proposal that will be widely accepted?

A good point to start this discussion might be the following statements (taken from WW's page, http://biology.bangor.ac.uk/~bss166/update.htm):

"Taxonomy is a matter of personal opinion..." H.G. Cogger, 1985, quoted in Golay et al., 1993.

"Taxonomy is a matter of consensus..." Golay, 1993

"Taxonomy is a matter of evidence... " Wüster, 2002

Well, I think it obivously is a little bit from every thing. Personal opinion (base on knowledge), consensus (e.g. species concepts, etc.) and evidence (the way personal opionion, consensus and results are presented in the argumentation).

If taxonomy would only be a thing of personal opinion (based on knowledge), proposals, as those written by Hoser would have to be accepted, wouldn't they?
Consensus would acutally still accept propsals based on e.g. the BSC, wouldn't they?
Evidence seems to be the most convincing thing in taxonomy. But evidence also is a matter of knowledge and the objective view of the results and argumentation presented in a paper.

Which methods should be used to be evident? Some workers prefer morphological characters, others say that DNA analysis would be the most objective thing and therefore the most evident. But which one to use? mtDNA or nuclear DNA? Can every base pair really be used as a character? Is it a consensus today, not to use the BSC anymore because the reproductive isolation can not be tested in the wild? What about personal opinion towards evidence and consensus?

just to start a maybe interesting discussion...

Cheers,
Wulf
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