Taxacom: A compromise solution (was Re: Single official lists of taxa (sensu Doug Yanega many proposals to this list))

Thu Jul 6 07:16:50 CDT 2023

I see several arguments to keep the gender agreement:

1) It will exist in the botanical code and I hate to see that things work differently in both codes as it complicates working with names across codes

2) It becomes hard to remember a name when the genus contains epithets of various genders which David has pointed out. It would also not be possible to built rules in software but instead requires a complete ZooBank or alike lookup. Stephens idea of doing away with a single correct name would be a better option, but might cause other problems.

3) Names with wrong gender agreement are rather painful to read when you do know latin. I am surprised no one has mentioned this argument so far. If you were to write a scientific paper in French and ignored gender agreement reviewers wouldn't be happy. 

What on the other hand if there would be a website to simplify the burden of figuring out the correct gender instead?
Listing the gender of all genera should be an achievable task. One could probably even programmatically generate content by looking at the epithets of the existing names and how they changed between genera. A simple website that allows anyone to check a name according to what is known already, contribute to the genera and epithets and in unknown cases maybe even broker to people who enjoy such research?

Markus

> On 6. Jul 2023, at 13:37, Lücking, Robert via Taxacom <taxacom at lists.ku.edu> wrote:
> 
> GBIF (and other large and capable databases or portals or tools) already to exactly that. In GBIF, type in the variants of Bombus ruderatus or a synonym and it always leads you to Bombus ruderatus. There still is a single, correct name, and yet, orthographic variants and synonyms are properly taken care of. No contradiction. No problem.
> 
> Robert
> 
> 
> 
> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: Taxacom <taxacom-bounces at lists.ku.edu> Im Auftrag von Stephen Thorpe via Taxacom
> Gesendet: Donnerstag, 6. Juli 2023 12:45
> An: taxacom at lists.ku.edu; David Redei <david.redei at gmail.com>
> Betreff: Re: Taxacom: A compromise solution (was Re: Single official lists of taxa (sensu Doug Yanega many proposals to this list))
> 
> I will again suggest that what is needed is a move away from the idea of a single correct name for a taxon. Bombus ruderatus is the same name (from the point of view of homonymy) but just a different spelling from B. ruderatum and B. ruderata. If we are to track information on the species, we need to search for all three spelling variants, in case someone has used them. In the same way, we need to search for all synonyms and alternative combinations for the same species. You can call one of the gender variants the "correct" one, but what does that actually achieve? People will still use the other variants, as lepidopterists have been doing all along, without problems. The easiest solution is just to consider all gender variants to be synonyms and you track a taxon by the set of all its synonyms.
> Stephen
>    On Thursday, 6 July 2023 at 10:13:02 pm NZST, David Redei via Taxacom <taxacom at lists.ku.edu> wrote:  
> 
> No, sorry, I absolutely do not like Adam's suggestion. Then genera will contain some names with masculine, some with feminine, and some with neuter ending, and sorry, I do not want to remember that "OK, Bombus lapidarius, Bombus ruderatus, Bombus alpinus, Bombus confusus, Bombus auricomus and Bombus balteatus are all masculine, but Bombus germanica and Bombus pulchra are feminine and Bombus nigrum is neuter, because they were recently transferred from other genera and they kept their former ending. (Imaginary
> names.) Throwing away rules and making people remember each and every name one by one is considerably more difficult than following rules. People can cite examples of problematic adjectives, but the fact is that the overwhelming majority of the adjectives are easy to handle.
> 
> In my opinion, "prevailing usage" is the most swampy and controversial term in the current Code. Glossary defines it as "*that usage of the name which is adopted by at least a substantial majority of the most recent authors concerned with the relevant taxon, irrespective of how long ago their work was published.*" What is "substantial majority"? If there are 100 authors,
> 51 of them uses one usage, 49 the other, it is definitely not a "substantial majority". How about 55 : 45? 60 : 40? 70 : 30? Where is the limit? What if there are only 10 people using the name, and the ratio is 9
> : 1, is it a substantial majority? Can we call 9 people a "majority"? How about a scenario when only 6 people used the name in the past 100 years and their ratio is 4 : 2, is it substantial majority?  What if the ratio is 30:70, but most of the 70 authors publish in exotic journals in exotic languages therefore most of the scientific committee do not read them, while the 30 authors publish in easily available periodicals in universally understood languages therefore all members of the scientific community read them, would we call the 70 as "prevailing usage" in this case?
> 
> This term is a nightmare, lacking any clear definition, you need to rely on your subjective feelings. Moreover, using the "prevailing usage" is highly difficult in practice, since you need to make a major literature search to establish the prevailing usage.
> 
> In my opinion, gender agreement might be surely a trouble for some people who do not want to waste time for learning something supposedly "useless"
> (?), but abandoning it would be a very significant step backwards, highly destabilizing nomenclature. Please note that *the "prevailing usage" is precisely the gender agreement itself: changing the ending of the specific epithets is a practice that has been in prevailing usage in the past 250
> years*.* Our currently existing "prevailing usage" of names is based on gender agreement*, which was overwhelmingly correctly (and yes, sometimes
> incorrectly) applied in all names (minus Lepidoptera).  If you really seek stability, you cannot abandon it.
> 
> David Redei
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, 6 Jul 2023 at 13:36, George Beccaloni via Taxacom < taxacom at lists.ku.edu> wrote:
> 
>> Hi Adam,
>> 
>> I think your compromise solution is a really excellent suggestion - 
>> one which should satisfy users of scientific names, promote stability 
>> and make names 'true' unique identifiers - so important in this IT 
>> age. One suggestion though: rather than relying on 'prevailing usage' 
>> to 'fix' the name, the new Code could set a date, and state that the 
>> name to be used after that date is the one used in the last valid 
>> nomenclatural act published before that date. That would be unambiguous.
>> 
>> I think much of the discussion on the issue of gender agreement misses 
>> what I regard to be the main point: that in the modern age it is 
>> highly desirable to have unique identifiers for species. Allowing the 
>> names to change spelling because of gender agreement may have been 
>> fine in the pre-computer era, but is of detriment now. How can anyone 
>> say a species name is a unique identifier when the spelling of the 
>> species-group name can change if it moves to another genus? This is 
>> madness, but is perhaps an issue more keenly felt by those of us who 
>> deal with huge catalogues of names, rather than those who do not.
>> 
>> George
>> 
>> **********************************************************************
>> ******
>> *Dr George Beccaloni FLS*
>> *Director, Alfred Russel Wallace Correspondence Project*
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>> 
>> On Thu, 6 Jul 2023 at 02:41, Adam Cotton via Taxacom 
>> <taxacom at lists.ku.edu
>>> 
>> wrote:
>> 
>>> There is a relatively simple solution to the gender agreement issue 
>>> that I would like to propose.
>>> 
>>> I do not think that lepidopterists really want to impose original 
>>> spellings for all zoological names in other taxa. We have already 
>>> been using original spellings for most species names for a long time 
>>> with exceptions for incorrect subsequent spellings that are in 
>>> prevailing usage (e.g. Papilio pitmanii -the original spelling - was 
>>> changed to pitmani over 100 years ago, and that spelling is in 
>>> prevailing usage so is regarded as the 'correct' spelling under article 33.3.1).
>>> 
>>> I propose that when a species is transferred to another genus gender 
>>> agreement should no longer be applied, and instead use the current 
>>> spelling of the species name regardless of the gender of the new genus.
>>> That way species names would be fixed permanently, so that e.g. the 
>>> species known as Bombus lapidarius, Camponotus herculeanus, and 
>>> Polistes gallicus would continue to be called lapidarius, 
>>> herculeanus, and gallicus even if they were moved to different genera.
>>> 
>>> This suggested 'compromise' could easily be incorporated in the 5th 
>>> edition of the Code by applying the prevailing usage concept, which 
>>> is already widely used in the current Code, with relevant new 
>>> articles to govern these changes. This would actually simplify the 
>>> Code a lot, as many more articles pertaining to gender agreement 
>>> would be removed than the new ones added to implement the system.
>>> 
>>> Previously described species names would continue to use the 
>>> spelling in current prevailing use, even if it is not the spelling 
>>> in the original description, and newly described species group names 
>>> would never subsequently change their spellings.
>>> 
>>> There will be some cases where more than one spelling is currently 
>>> used in the literature, in which case priority could be given to the 
>>> original spelling if prevailing usage is unclear.
>>> 
>>> Some taxonomists will not like my suggested solution, but it would 
>>> solve the whole problem without names having to change from their 
>>> current spellings. I vote for the principle of nomenclatural 
>>> stability which the current Code aspires to. There is nothing more 
>>> stable than species names which never change when they are moved to 
>>> a different genus. I suspect that implementing this suggestion would 
>>> also make life a lot easier for the database people too.
>>> 
>>> Adam.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 06/07/2023 05:17, Douglas Yanega via Taxacom wrote:
>>>> On 7/5/23 1:54 PM, John Noyes wrote:
>>>>> Hi Doug,
>>>>> 
>>>>> Fair enough, but you cannot get away from the argument that 
>>>>> gender agreement is just simply 100% unnecessary. Forget about it 
>>>>> being a waste of time. If we all worked on the premise that all 
>>>>> genera have no gender then it would make life a whole lot easier. 
>>>>> Like many people I definitely prefer the original spelling.
>>>> 
>>>> And you work, by and large, with species names that rarely enter 
>>>> the non-taxonomic literature. In contrast, using a few other 
>>>> hymenopteran genera as examples, consider that many of the most 
>>>> common bumblebee species in the world, and many of the most common 
>>>> ants, and many of the most common paper wasps, would all suddenly 
>>>> have to change spellings because they have been in masculine 
>>>> genera for over 100 years, but their original Linnaean or 
>>>> Fabrician genera were feminine (e.g., Apis, Formica, and Vespa). 
>>>> The many people - including laypeople - who are familiar with 
>>>> common European species like Bombus lapidarius, Camponotus 
>>>> herculeanus, and Polistes gallicus wouldn't be happy *at all*.
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