Taxacom: TAXACOM -- the long goodbye

[Douglas Yanega]

Two things I'd like to say:

(1) My appreciation is deep for those who have maintained this list over 
the years, but please don't think that my appreciation is diminished in 
any way if I suggest that migrating the list to another platform such as 
Google Groups would be VERY much worth considering. Such a migration 
worked well for the ICZN's private mailing list, I'm betting it can work 
well for Taxacom, too.

(2) Rich's prodding, tongue-in-cheek or otherwise, does relate to an 
issue I am somewhat struggling with at present, and I think it might be 
illuminating:

I am at work on a revision of the basal clade within Phasmatodea, the 
relictual genus Timema. People have recognized that some of the species 
in the genus are wholly parthenogenetic, and have been so for millions 
of years, based on the DNA evidence (which has been heavily scrutinized 
and published via peer review). Here's the thing: it appears possible, 
maybe even probable, that some of the sexual species have given rise to 
*more than one* parthenogenetic species. The parthenogens are allopatric 
with the parental lineage, and with one another.

Now, to my mind, these parthenogens should best be classified as 
subspecies. Why? Because their exclusion and treatment as separate 
species would make the sexual parental lineage paraphyletic. Such a 
classification doesn't rely upon the biological species concept, nor 
does it rely upon the percentage difference in COI barcodes. It relies 
instead upon a phylogeny of populations. It's not the kind of data one 
usually is in a position to work with, but I don't think I should ignore 
it, if that's what the evidence is.

I would say that we've been at this game long enough to know that MOST 
of the time, nature is organized into populations that either interbreed 
or don't. We TRY to correlate our use of the term "species" to clusters 
of populations in the first category, and MOST of the time the evidence 
suggests that the natural world operates this way. Just because we can 
find occasional exceptions like "ring species", lateral gene transfer, 
or introgressive hybridization, doesn't mean we have to abandon 
everything, it just keeps us on our toes. A concept doesn't need to be 
perfect, just functional and predictive, like any other hypothesis.

Peace,

-- 
Doug Yanega      Dept. of Entomology       Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314    phone: 951-827-4315
FaceBook: Doug Yanega (disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
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   "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
         is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82