Ah, irony (was: Unknown fruit & other plants...)

[Doug Yanega]

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Wedi ei archwilio am feirysau gan Amgueddfeydd ac Orielau Cenedlaethol Cymru.


Checked for viruses by National Museums & Galleries of Wales.
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Heike Vibrans wrote:

>And, as I said, that
>is what I am being paid for; a private enterprise charges
>every service individually; I charge collectively through
>my salary. Personally, I prefer it that way.

This assumes you have a salary: if your employer is a state-run
agency, then taxonomists and the collections they work in, being
perceived as worthless, are among the first to go when the
bean-counters start making noise about the budget. Just ask the folks
at the Scripps Institute about their research collection. If
taxonomists apply for public funds, such as NSF, they suffer a
distinct handicap, as they are (a) competing with other disciplines
that are perceived as more worthwhile, including beta-taxonomy being
perceived as more worthwhile than alpha-taxonomy and (b) unless they
are *molecular* taxonomic studies, the budgets are so small that they
are unlikely to be perceived as worthy of funding - nor are
tenure-track academics whose grants are so small as likely to *get*
tenure.

>Second, I find it hard to believe that in the United
>States it is really impossible to get legal or medical
>advice (as opposed to treatment or formal representation)
>for free.

I was making the point that paying for these services is the *norm*.
If 90% of lawyers gave out legal advice for free, the remaining 10%
would find it hard to make a living, and society would place little
value on them.

>Publicly employed doctors tend to gripe about
>their pay, just as scientists do (particularly as they
>tend to compare it to their US counterparts), but they are
>almost always reasonably well-off within their societies.

Doctors are different in that there is a universally-recognized need
for them, and the public in many countries happily pays to support
them. Still, I can't think of any countries where 90% of the lawyers
are on the public payroll and give legal advice for free.

>Sixth - making science - knowledge - proprietary is an
>extremely bad idea. The strength of science is in the free
>interchange of information, particularly in the public
>critical review of methods, results and conclusions.
>Making information propietary is necesary in certain areas
>in modern societies, but these should be very limited.

Now you have clearly missed my point about what is proprietary,
perhaps through my choice of words. I was NOT talking about the
information itself being proprietary. Jason Mate brought up a point
about this, upon which I'd like to elaborate, when he said:

>This is freely available to *anybody* who has access to
>a very good natural history library. Hence the information is not
>*proprietary*! It is already available, albeit in a usually indigestible
>form. The supply is the taxonomist, whose job is managing this information
>and makes it useful to others. And as other information managers (=
>consultants) you can charge for your services.

Lawyers are again a very good analogy: you and I can easily acquire
law books - ALL the information behind the legal profession is freely
accessible! However, deciphering the information is a different
matter. And, most important, even if we *could* make sense out of
what was in the law books, we would still not be able to go out and
start getting paid to practice law. Why? Because the *service* that
lawyers perform is MADE proprietary by the requirement that you must
pass the Bar Exam before you can be certified as a lawyer and allowed
to practice (same basic thing for doctors). This requirement was
devised by the legal profession to limit its practice to those who
met a defined set of standards - and, in the process, gives a
consumer the ability to discriminate between a real lawyer versus
some clown who just picked up some law books - thus, the certified
lawyer is a rare commodity, more highly valued, and can command more
in exchange for his services. If anyone could practice law, then the
profession as a whole would suffer. As long as people think that any
clown can identify and classify plants and animals, we will in turn
be perceived as clowns, instead of as *professionals*.

>Finally: conservation organization money often pays for
>taxonomic and inventory work, as far as I know, does it
>not?

I'm trying to think of any taxonomists who are employed by
conservation organization money, and drawing a blank, though Dan
Janzen might come close (and it's essentially his own private
conservation organization). There are certainly "morphospecies" and
"megafauna" inventories being done, but neither typically pay for
descriptive work, and the former sometimes don't even involve actual
identification.

>And: ALL scientists, not only taxonomists, dream of
>having working money without having to waste so much time
>writing grant proposals ... Perhaps, one of these days,
>someone does a serious economic analysis of this matter
>and concludes that it is more efficient to give everybody
>a budget, perhaps based on performance ....

Look at it this way: if there were a box on the income tax form which
said "Would you like five dollars of your tax money to be donated to
the International Biodiversity Association?" that people could check
off, even if only a fraction of the population did, we would still
multiply the present level of funding for taxonomy by at least an
order of magnitude. The goal is not to make taxonomists wealthy, but
to support more taxonomists - and my feeling is we need to be more
credible and more visible to accomplish such a goal - and creating a
professional association would simultaneously give us more
credibility and visibility. Again, is there a concrete reason we
could not create such an association?

Sincerely,
--

Doug Yanega        Dept. of Entomology         Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California - Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521
phone: (909) 787-4315 (standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
            http://entmuseum9.ucr.edu/staff/yanega.html
   "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
         is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82