[Taxacom] Regrets (How far are we to complete a world listing)

[Kenneth Kinman]

  Dear All, 
       This all brings up sad memories for me personally.
Back in 1980, I attempted to procure initial funding for a 30-year
project to produce a computerized catalog of all species of organisms
(prokaryotes, protists, fungi, plants and animals) by the year 2010.
Yes, this is the year that I had hoped to have completed the whole
thing. The 1980 proposal was modest, at $25,000 to $30,000 per year. Yet
neither the U.S. government agencies nor private foundations seemed
interested in such an endeavor.       
        Anyway, that was the big dream of my life, but
it was not to be.  Eventually, I decided to at least try something less
bold, namely a cladisto-eclectic classification of organisms (at Kingdom
to Order levels) that would organize that diversity in a way that would
hopefully unifiy the efforts of both strict cladists and traditional
taxonomists.  How much headway I might have made in that lesser goal is
still uncertain. Probably my biggest mistake on that front was also
pursuing the secondary goal of standardizing the endings of such higher
taxa. In retrospect, that wasn't very smart given strict cladism's
efforts to do away with such Linnean categories altogether.      
          In any case, all that is water under the
bridge. Just getting paraphyletic taxa recognized at all is now a
struggle. My dream of a computerized listing of all species of organisms
has been reduced to something less expansive, but more complex and more
fundamental (the formal recognition of paraphyletic taxa at any level).        
            --------Ken Kinman    
P.S.  As for Onychophora, I estimated 80-90 living species back in 1994,
but this is probably outdated (with more species described since then).
Still I think that even today, 200 species must be based on what a
splitter might recognize.  However, this is such a small group that
estimates on species numbers in speciose groups such as Coleoptera would
range in the thousands of species (not dozens) and thus would dwarf it
into insignificance.  Even flies, nematodes, and mollusc species numbers
totally dwarf the largest estimates of onychophoran species numbers.
The range of species numbers in some of their families would render
onychophoran species numbers into insignificance.