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

[Richard Pyle]

I am currently in the field, but wanted to take a moment to say that I WHOLEHEARTEDLY endorse and support Doug's approach to this very important issue!  Indeed, I have always supported this approach since Doug first proposed it, and I hope this year I will *finally* be able to find the time to begin incorporating it (the two lists, and the associated logic) into ZooBank.

Aloha (from Rapa Nui),
Rich

Richard L. Pyle, PhD
Director of EXCORE | Senior Curator of Ichthyology | Database Coordinator for Natural Sciences
Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum
1525 Bernice Street, Honolulu, HI 96817-2704
Office: (808) 848-4115;  Fax: (808) 847-8252
eMail: deepreef at bishopmuseum.org
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Taxacom <taxacom-bounces at lists.ku.edu> On Behalf Of Douglas
> Yanega via Taxacom
> Sent: Thursday, January 30, 2025 6:42 PM
> To: taxacom at lists.ku.edu
> Subject: Re: Taxacom: Mandatory ending correction after 226 years of wrong
> usage - the Dasytes case
> 
> 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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>          is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82
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