On 2/19/2012 12:49 PM, Curtis Clark wrote:

* I think a lot of the kinks in this thread have pointed out that the problems being grappled with are largely caused by the fact that taxonomy, in trying to provide globally unique names for every taxon, was so far out in advance of other fields that we've had a system for solving these problems that's been evolving for a couple of centuries, and the solutions for one technology can become problems for a subsequent technology. The problem of how to extract ideas from text, for example, would be much more straight-forward than that of how to extract taxonomic names from text, because it wouldn't be hedged around with a wilderness of old rules and practices; and if we were starting out now to name all taxa from scratch, we could have very direct and simpler ways of applying unique identifiers.

In this case, the old technology is the author-date citation for a name, which looks so much like the author-date citation for a publication that it's fatally confusing to cite the publication that's the authority of a species concept rather than of a name (the author-date citation for a publication may well, in fact, have evolved as a mimic of the taxonomic form). I've always thought that this similarity has inhibited the citation of an accepted authority for individual names, along the lines of "Nomenclature follows Munz (1974)," in the way one would cite the authority for any other kind of statement.

fred.

------------------------------------------------------------ Frederick W. Schueler & Aleta Karstad Bishops Mills Natural History Centre - http://pinicola.ca/bmnhc.htm Mudpuppy Night in Oxford Mills - http://pinicola.ca/mudpup1.htm Daily Paintings - http://karstaddailypaintings.blogspot.com/ South Nation Basin Art & Science Book http://pinicola.ca/books/SNR_book.htm RR#2 Bishops Mills, Ontario, Canada K0G 1T0 on the Smiths Falls Limestone Plain 44* 52'N 75* 42'W (613)258-3107 <bckcdb at istar.ca> http://pinicola.ca/

------------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------------

_______________________________________________

Taxacom Mailing List Taxa...@mailman.nhm.ku.edu http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/taxacom

The Taxacom archive going back to 1992 may be searched with either of these
methods:

(1) by visiting http://taxacom.markmail.org

(2) a Google search specified as: site:mailman.nhm.ku.edu/pipermail/taxacom
your search terms here