Interested in whether or not people see a problem with increasingly granular species being described via the use of New technology. Everyone is in favor of continued exploration, discovery and progress… but do the discoveries enabled by new technologies warrant a new rank below species? And should…

[image] pmeisenheimer: And what meaning would that be? That it is the only taxonomic rank widely used outside the scientific community? As in, laypersons who don’t know about taxonomic rankings will still refer to “species” (in whatever sense the word means to them) and use terms like “endang…

[image] swampster: This doesn’t really hold true. Some taxonomic levels are less well known, but certainly things like “birds”, “reptiles”, etc. mean something and so do most (all?) of the finer and broader scale classifications. Taxonomy is messy sure, but no taxonomic level is meaningless. F…

Thx swampster. Your last quoting of me was a good one @elsemikkelsen . Which is to say, a bad one (for me). lol My concern is that the rank of species loses real world biological meaning to ordinary people.

Yes, I understand what you were saying, and sorry if the quote I pulled removed some of the context of your point. [image] elsemikkelsen: but there is no biological reason why they should be a class vs some other rank That being said, I still don’t fully agree with this statement. This is ju…

[image] stockslager: My concern is that the rank of species loses real world biological meaning to ordinary people. Which is an odd thing to be concerned about. “Ordinary people” already use the word species in ways that have no relationship to biology. They always have and always will. That …

[image] swampster: This is just as much true for the species level as it is for any other level, or rather, no other level is any more or less arbitrary than the species level. Taxonomic levels are often ill defined, inconsistent, and, to an extent, arbitrary, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a…

[image] elsemikkelsen: where exactly to draw the division between “bird” and “not bird” on the tree of dinosaurs. We can’t test do any experiments to objectively decide what rank to give them, but we can do experiments to see whether two things should be given species rank or split into separate…

I don’t want to sound like I’m minimizing the difficulty of those sorts of experiments or that there is some sort of easy objective checklist to decide whether something is a species or not a species. Speciation is a continuum, and the Carolina and Black-capped Chickadee are somewhere along that con…

I agree with this entire statement. But I think all the other ranks also reflect some real process of continued divergence that has biological meaning. This is why some biodiversity metrics take into account amount of divergence in addition to the standard species richness and evenness. Genera-zatio…

Should New Disruptive Technologies be Used for Classification in Ancient Linnaean Rankings

Nature Talk

stockslager April 9, 2024, 12:26am 57

I disagree.

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Should New Disruptive Technologies be Used for Classification in Ancient Linnaean Rankings

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