IISE

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.