Taxacom: TAXACOM -- the long goodbye

[Jared Bernard]

Nice questions, Richard. Funny, I was just about to say that Taxacom could
keep going for another 10 years to end on the 300th anniversary of binomial
nomenclature classification system by Linnaeus.

I know what you mean about a continuum, with species complexes, species,
and populations that we fight to categorize. I could spew the typical line
of pre/postzygotic barriers, the testing of which would be a ton of work to
do for each species description! (Studying speciation is difficult enough.)
Or I could say that there are numerous species concepts (not just Mayr, but
typological, ecological, phylogenetic, recognition, etc.) and that we
shouldn't expect a universal species concept -- that "it's all relative",
as Darwin wrote to Charles Lyell. Taxonomy is in many ways more of an art
than a science (or when looking at the Codes, perhaps more of a
bureaucracy). And subspecies seem especially subjective to me. Not to be
too heady, but it can be more of a science with biological hypotheses when
we use more tools to make conclusions, rather than simply gestalt based on
x number of decades looking at specimens. I'm not talking about replacing
morphological approaches, only making them better, or with multiple
approaches (particularly to account for cryptic species or microbes).

Is there a reason why Taxacom can't just be left to continue? I imagine
other listservs shutting down. It seems their managers just hand the torch
over instead.

Jared