Some repentance would not hurt taxonomy either: a junior taxonomist’s response to Quentin Wheeler

I was fortunate enough to attend a talk by Dr Quentin Wheeler at the Entomological Society meeting in Reno, 17 November 2008 entitled ‘Unrepentant Taxonomy for the 21st Century’. The talk was a captivating presentation of the ideas also outlined in Dr Wheeler’s contribution to the January 2008 issue of this journal (Wheeler, 2008a). The agenda is clear – contemporary taxonomy is an irreplaceable service to humanity as it documents and publicizes the quickly disappearing wonder of biological diversity. Despite its inherent value, it is appallingly underfunded and suffers from low recognition compared with other sciences. Without doubt, the taxonomic community shares these sentiments, and can unite behind the efforts suggested by Dr Wheeler in his many publications. However, as a taxonomist just entering the field, and in trying to see the situation as pragmatically as possible, I feel that several points in Dr Wheeler’s thesis deserve to be revisited and examined for unexplained assumptions. Somemay turn out to be the main causes of disagreements not only between the taxonomic community and the outside world, but among taxonomists themselves. First, Dr Wheeler seems to imply that the Hennigian revolution was achieved by us, the taxonomic community, but somehow was lost within funding sources and society at large. Although it is certainly true that the funding sources’ appreciation of systematic biology is desperately low, I feel that it may be to some extent our (the taxonomists’) own fault, and that it is us who may need to discipline ourselves before we ask grant agencies to do the same. Second, the very definition of ‘value’ may differ for each of us. Have we all been doing enough to produce taxonomy that will earn more recognition than in the past? My experience comes from systematics of ambrosia beetles (Curculionidae: Scolytinae), but I suspect you have heard similar scenarios before: despite more than a 100 years of eager collecting and describing species of ambrosia beetles by many authors, the taxonomy of this group is in such chaos, that ecologists or foresters often have no choice but to designate de novo morphospecies for their work. I am glad to say that such scenarios are becoming a thing of the past, as the efficiency of the taxonomic community has improved incredibly. Please do not mistake my critical observations with placing blame on our predecessors. I am fully aware that in the past decades, efficient analytical methods and information technology simply were not available, and that in every scientific field, hypothesis-driven approaches require a few generations to become a standard. But it should not make us excuse the inefficiency, either, because the technological and methodological revolution in taxonomy is by no means finished. A common symptom of this is that, instead of choosing a method that is best for an a priori identified goal, for many taxonomists a fondness for a certain method comes first, and is used to define their work. It can be a perfectly valid approach, especially when one masters a skill set as complicated as dissection of insect genitalia. But it starts to be a problem, when the fondness is acknowledged as a more important criterion than utility. Then methods can easily become labels of factions within a divided community. Dr Wheeler is an accomplished proponent of the necessary transformation of taxonomy into a dataand technologybased science (Wheeler, 2008b). So why the resentment against incorporating modern analyses of molecular data into taxonomy? Why the peculiar disdain for the maximumlikelihood approach, dismissed as a new phenetics (which, of course, it is not, it is a character-based inference)? In principle, a morphological systematist deeply thinking about putative homologies or character state boundaries during the assembly of a dataset for cladistic analysis inevitably is formulating these hypotheses on the background of his or her experience with the variation of such characters. Assumptions about developmental or evolutionary plasticity inherently are present, and represent nothing else than subjective models of processes that gave rise to the variation. Hypotheses about processes, not just patterns, are present in both approaches. The difference I see as more important between a standard maximum-likelihood analysis of molecular characters and a standard way of scoring complex morphological characters is that, in the former, both the data and the model are explicit, Correspondence: Jiri Hulcr, Department of Entomology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824 U.S.A. E-mail: hulcr@msu.edu