Ernst Mayr's Alpha, Beta, and Gamma levels of taxonomy did nothing to preserve the dignity of so-called descriptive taxonomy.  Based on comments in the early pages of his 1942 Systematics and the Origin of Species, I suspect this was not an accident.  Relegating revisionary work to the lowest rung on a progressively more scientific conceptual ladder with evolutionary considerations at the top was indeed his design.  This made for a positive future for right-headed population-thinkers but left the observer thinking descriptive taxonomy was an anachronistic field for hermits in collections peering from under green eye shades and adjusting their armbands to reach that top pigeonhole.

It is time that we tease apart the diverse sub-fields of taxonomy and treat each with the dignity and importance befitting them.  They each play coequally important scientific roles and are quite interdependent making it undesirable to treat them otherwise.  What might a classification in place of Mayr's Greek letters be?  Here is one stab at it.

1. Analytical Taxonomy:  the sub-discipline of taxonomy concerned with formal descriptions of characters and species.  Such descriptions are themselves based on rigorous, explicit, testable hypotheses about characters and a sophisticated set of theories and methods generally associated with character analysis and distinguishing informative characters from uninformative, polymorphic "traits".  The corroborated hypotheses of analytical taxonomy are the factual foundations for phylogeny and phylogenetic classifications.

2. Phylogenetic Taxonomy/Systematics:  the sub-discipline of taxonomy that is focused on cladistic analysis and phylogenetic classification.

3. Phyloinformatics and Nomenclature:  the sub-discipline of taxonomy concerned with the efficient application of Linnaean nomenclature to provide unique identifiers for species in the form of binomials, a set of informative names for monophyletic higher taxa, and the management of taxonomic data, information, and knowledge in digital databases.

4. Translational Taxonomy:  the sub-discipline of taxonomy that focuses on translating knowledge of characters, species, and clades into useful applied information for the benefit of science and society.  The most familiar and simple example are accurate species identifications for field biologists.  A rapidly emerging example is biomimicry where evolutionary adapations are co-opted by engineers, chemists, designers, and others to solve real-world problems.

You will immediately see, also, that these four branches of taxonomy are overlapping with permeable boundaries.  This may benefit from a little tweaking but is, I submit, a step forward from Mayr's alpha/beta/gamma scheme.

Camoflaged Classification

“Camoflaging of courses to make them appear vocational is becoming an art of its own, and it is amusing to see colleges listing the only vocational benefit derivable from their courses of art as that of teaching art.

“If a course is limited to training teachers and those teachers are to teach others, just when will the vocational practice of the individual begin? How some schools do hate to roll up their sleeves and begin on the dishes!

“They will teach the lofty principles, only the theory, and George can flounder around and find the application later. And that is just why all the American Georges are about fifty years late in industrial art today.”

— Pedro J. Lemos, Leland Stanford Junior University, “The Industrial-Arts Magazine,” 1919.

The roll-up-your-sleeves, boots on the ground work of taxonomy is in a position not entirely dissimilar to that of the industrial arts at the turn of the last century. You can only talk about prosaic matters such as writing functional diagnostic keys or informative species descriptions, publishing floras or revisions or monographs, or translating cladograms (or, more often, neo-phenetic branching diagrams) into formal classifications and names, in hushed tones. Rather than openly celebrating the reciprocal illumination among fossils, anatomy, ontogeny, and molecular sequences, we as a community accede to the politically correct view that "phylogenies" are reconstructed from molecular data and that other characters are simply hung on this received knowledge of branching patterns like ornaments on a Christmas tree, after the fact and uncritically analyzed. We teach theory of phylogenetics and train students in the latest moelcular techiques, with no expectation that degree recipients will do much to address the messy, real world challenge of exploring, discovering, describing, classifying, and naming the ten million species of plants and animals that remain unknown to science. Refined, intelligent, right-minded people simply don't do taxonomy. They only teach the popular bits of it.

All Species Are Not Created Equally

The time has come for the tree-hugging, feel good conservation philosophy of the 1970s to take off its rose-colored glasses, step out of the hot tub, and towel off. As increasing numbers of species are threatened by extinction in the biodiversity crisis, it is increasingly critical that we adopt policies and goals that are informed by objective science and make tough choices based on explicitly accepted criteria.

There are of course competing goals in conservation. Are you concerned about ecological services? Evidence of phylogenetic history? Access to Nature's storehouse of answers to environmental challenges? George Will recently quipped that a great project like Hoover Dam could not be completed today as a public works program because an endangered minnow would be identified and bring the whole idea to a halt. There are times and places where a single species is so interesting or important that its preserveration should trump competing issues. There are other times and places where the Sophie's Choice should be made in order to save that trump card for an even more important moment.

As much as I wish we could save every species it is an unrealistic aim in the new world disorder. Our generation is going to oversee the extinction of hundreds of thousands if not millions of species and we can do so in one of two ways. We can pretend that our hands are clean and that we are just powerless witnesses to this biodiversity decimation and take our chances on some random outcome of the greatest species diversity bottleneck since the K-T boundary, or we can gather the fundamental taxonomic information necessary to make tough, but informed, choices and try to minimize the losses during this genetic dark age.

The only rational end game for conservation should be to maximize biodiversity as measured in phylogenetic and ecological diversity, not in simple numbers of species. Sustainable ecosystems are most probable given high levels of species diversity and if we knew enough about species and their distributions and relationships, we could prioritize the species, clades, ecosystems, and places most essential to a diverse and dynamic biosphere. This is, of course, a very imperfect approach but it is better than flying blind and accepting a random outcome.

Underneath our collective aversion to turning to objective science is an otherwise noble attempt to act as if all species had equal value. Such equality would be an admirable view were there no biodiversity crisis and were there even a remote chance of saving every species. Sadly, there are no such chances and clinging to policies that rest on such a false assumption is a dangerous path. Species are not equal. Losing Gingko biloba, the last living species of a branch of the tree of life, is a different proposition than losing one species of Atheta (a staphylinid beetle) in a genus with more than 2,000 living species that bear a remarkable resemblance one to another.

It is also disingenuous to pretend that current enforcement of species protection is anything like equal. Most endangered species are rare arthropods that no one has taken the time to get red listed, so we lavish protection on a handful of charismatic megafaunal species while ignoring invertebrates that may well be as or more important functional components of ecosytems.

Species are not equal in their contribution to phylogenetic knowledge, to ecological function, or to some other facet of biological diversity and we should not pretend in the middle of a biodiversity crisis that they deserve equal protection. This is PC heresy, of course, but it is good science, good public policy, and our last best hope for a sustainable biodiversity level that meets our future ecological service and intellectual curiosity needs.

Playing Around with TaxaToy

Source:
http://taxatoy.ubio.org/

If you have not done so, I highly recommend you visit TaxaToy (link above), another clever contribution from the UBIO crew at Woods Hole. When you drill down to less inclusive taxa it is fascinating to see the pattern, frequently tracking the cyclic nature of monography and major revisions. Recognizing that all data is not yet available and particularly for recent years, the overall pattern is broadly consistent with seat of the pants history. There was a strong positive trend in the annual rate of species description with an expected hiatus at the time of the World Wars. Taxonomy bounced back quickly to pre-War levels but after WWII it never regained its positively accelerating trajectory. When one factors in the post-War growth in the academic workforce and the technological leaps since, this becomes a sad picture.

It is not coincidental that the WWII period was marked also by Huxley's "The New Systematics" and shortly thereafter Mayr's "Systematics and the Origin of Species" --- what might as well have been titled "Systematics the Demise of Taxonomy." Capitalizing on the wave of excitement (appropriately) associated with the rise of modern genetics and galvanizing a strong bias toward experimental biology already well established in the U.S. and Europe, Mayr and his comrades found it an easy matter to diminish "merely descriptive" taxonomy in the eyes of modern, right-minded, "population thinking" biologists.

If we are to learn enough about our planet's species to develop fact-based policies and strategies to achieve sustainable biodiversity, we not only must renew the upward course of species discovery and description, we must reverse the devastating effects of this short-sighted neglect of taxonomy.

Almost any combination of several options could immediately speed taxonomy by an order of magnitude to say 200,000 species per year: providing support to existing taxonomists in the form of staff and funding, modernizing the research platform for taxonomy with special investment in cyberinfrastructure, and focusing efforts of distributed collections and experts as demonstrated in the successful NSF-funded Planetary Biodiversity Inventory (PBI) projects.

Evolution of Cybertaxonomy

Cybertaxonomy is entering an exciting new phase in its evolution. The early steps that have led to cybertaxonomy began with databasing in the 1980s. The focus now as then has largely been on digitizing existing taxonomic information and making it accessible via the Internet. Such digitial data access is extremely important, indeed essential, yet is merely the beginning. A negative consequence is that this emphasis on mobilizing existing information gives to some a false impression that taxonomic knowledge is static and, once created, simply needs to be moved around and made accessible through convenient portals. Taxonomy, of course, is a hypothesis-based science and unless hypotheses about characters, homologies, synapomorphies, species, and clades are continually tested by all and the latest evidence, then the value of that knowledge is diminished and it becomes less of a reflection of the natural world and mere historical artifacts.

We have entered the second phase in the evolution of cybertaxonomy that is characterized by a focus on meeting the needs of taxonomists to create new taxonomic knowledge and test and verify (or correct or replace) existing knowledge of characters, species, and clades. This will be a period of unprecedented discovery, when most of the 12 million living species of plants and animals are described and when a cyber-enabled research environment is built that will allow taxonomists to work more efficiently than ever before. The challenge will be to retain the best of the past 250 years of theory and practice while accelerating where possible --- without sacrifice of the quality and integrity of the research --- to make taxonomy as efficient and cost effective as possible. Assuming that we succeed in investing in taxonomy to increase discovery and description of species by an order of magnitude, the bulk of this major push for discovery can be completed by 2058--- the 300th anniversary of Systema naturae (10th ed.).

Cybertaxonomy would then move into a steady state of continual testing of characters, species, and clades and refining the ease and flexibility of accessing, synthesizing, aggregating, and using taxonomic information for many diverse purposes.

Taxonomy and Biodiversity Sustainability

It is difficult to save species that we do not know and cannot recognize, and it is impossible to prove to the world that we have. The neglect of taxonomy since the 1940s has had two dramatic and damaging impacts on our prospects for sustainable biodiversity: it has capped the rate at which species are discovered, described, and named to WWII era levels, and it has slowed the production of revisions and monographs so that theories of known species remain untested, unimproved, and non-reflective of the most recent and best evidence.

If we are serious about biodiversity sustainability, and we had better be, then the common sense first step is to support taxonomy to create baseline knowledge of what species exist and where in the biosphere so that we have biological clarity about what it is we seek to see sustained and a fact based basis on which to measure our successes and failures.

Taxonomy remains out of fashion and we now have generations of environmental and even evolutionary biologists who are ignorant of the theories, traditions, history, and scientific rigor of modern taxonomy done well. This bias against taxonomy is as great a challenge and fully as important to the positive outcome of biodiversity sustainability efforts as the sum total of conservation projects around the world. No area of science offers as much return on investment as taxonomy and the field is ripe for investment now. Enabled by the latest advances in cyberinfrastructure, taxonomy is ready, able, and willing to launch the greatest period of species discovery ever seen and to arm society with the fundamental knowledge needed to achieve biodiversity sustainability.