The perils of DNA barcoding and the need for integrative taxonomy.

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D. Wheeler. 2005. The perils of DNA barcoding and the need for integrative taxonomy. Syst. Biol. 54:844– First submitted 23 March 2005; reviews returned 9 June 2005; final acceptance 12 July 2005 Associate Editor: Vincent Savolainen Syst. Biol. 54(5):844–851, 2005 c Society of Systematic Biologists Copyright ISSN: 1063-5157 print / 1076-836X online DOI: 10.1080/10635150500354878 The Perils of DNA Barcoding and the Need for Integrative Taxonomy K IPLING W. W ILL , 1 B RENT D. M ISHLER , 2 AND Q UENTIN D. W HEELER 3 ESPM Department—Insect Biology and 2 Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London, SW7 5BD, UK “Your work, Sir, is both new and good, but what’s new is not good and what’s good is not new. ” Samuel Johnson We argue that DNA barcoding has both new and good elements, but unfortunately no elements that are both. We are strongly in favor of the good idea of using DNA for identification, but that is old hat—the use of DNA for identification goes back to the beginning of molecular systematics. The DNA barcoders cannot take any credit for that. Their new idea that DNA barcoding can replace normal taxonomy for naming new species and studying their relationships is worse than bad, it is destructive. Statements by some barcoding proponents suggest an in- evitable replacement of taxonomic research rather than augmentation of technology to taxonomic science, e.g., “a COI-based identification system will undoubtedly Downloaded from http://sysbio.oxfordjournals. org/ at UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY on August 29, 2013 I thank Kipling Will and Paul Hebert for taking part in the de- bate, Mike Irwin and Gail Kampmeier for organizing the fifth biennial PEET conference, and the National Science Foundation for financially supporting this meeting. Kevin Cummings, Martin Hauser, Andrew Miller, Mark Wetzle, and Kazunori Yoshizawa provided specimens and in some cases unpublished DNA sequences that were used dur- ing the species identification demonstration in this session. Martin Hauser, Mathys Meyer, Floyd Shockley, Daniela Takiya, and Jamie Zahniser assisted in the running of the debate. The symposium video was filmed and edited by Ritch Strom on behalf of the office of con- tinuing education at the University of Illinois. Rasplus Jean-Yves, Kevin Johnson, Rod Page, Diana Percy, Vincent Savolainen, Jason Weckstein, and an anonymous reviewer provided comments on an earlier (and considerably different) version of this manuscript. This work was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (DEB-0107891). VOL. 54