Taxacom: Mandatory ending correction after 226 years of wrong usage - the Dasytes case

[Douglas Yanega]

On 1/30/25 3:04 PM, Thomas Pape via Taxacom wrote:
> Good points, Doug.
>
>>>> With access to just two lists, anyone can answer the question
> But why two lists, if one is enough?
> Why not build Catalogue of Life into that single authoritative source of scientific names?
>
*Efficiency*. In two very important respects:

(1) A single list would have to include every combination. Not just the 
~2 million available species names, but all of the combinations they'd 
ever been published in. Otherwise, you would never be able to check 
whether a name you found in the older literature is correct.

Even if you did want to just list the *present* combination for every 
species name, that's still a list of around 2 million names, and a lot 
of names whose present genus is in dispute.

In your hypothetical example, moving a bunch of spiders from one genus 
into another, if you only had one list, *none of the new combinations 
would be in that list*. You would need to manually add new records to 
the list for each new combination. You'd have to do that every time 
*any* species in *any* zoological group was moved from one genus to 
another. That's a huge investment of human labor, involving *tens of 
thousands of new combinations every year, in addition to thousands of 
entirely new species*. That's a massive and costly undertaking, and 
unnecessary.

With *two* lists, you *never* need to add new combinations, or new 
species names. You only need to add *new genus-rank names* as they are 
described. Since Latin is not an active growing language, *no one is 
creating new declinable Latin adjectives any more* - at least, not in 
terms of new suffixes. If someone creates a new species name 
"losangelesensis" that has never been used before, so long as the list 
contains an algorithm that correctly recognizes "-ensis" as an 
adjectival suffix, the name "losangelesensis" never needs to be manually 
entered into the list. Any newly-coined species name that is a noun 
(like "myfavoritecelebrityi") doesn't need to be added to the list, 
because the list is ONLY intended for declinable adjectives.

By splitting it into two lists, you only need to link the 380,000 genus 
names with roughly 20,000 declinable adjectives on an /ad hoc/ basis. 
It's computationally much more efficient to do it this way, and VASTLY 
less labor-intensive.

(2) Most importantly, by using two lists, the adjectival list can 
include the spelling variants, allowing gender agreement AND spelling 
changes to be fully automated. If you have one list containing the name 
Palpimanus persicus, and you now want to move it into the genus Funny, 
then YOU will have to know how to determine that the spelling variant 
you want to use is "persicum". By using a list that contains only 
epithets, it can store *all three spelling variants* (persica, persicus, 
persicum), and display only the one that matches the gender of the genus 
that you wish to combine it with - it will *automatically* tell you that 
"Funny persicum" is the correct spelling. That process won't work if you 
only have one list.

No catalogue will *ever* be able to serve the function that we need - 
it's entirely the wrong tool for the job.

Peace,

-- 
Doug Yanega      Dept. of Entomology       Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314  voicemail:951-827-8704
FaceBook: Doug Yanega (disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
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