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In defence of taxonomic governance

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Abstract

It is well known that taxonomists rely on many different methods and criteria for species delimitation, leading to different kinds of groups being recognised as species. While this state of relative disorder is widely acknowledged, there is no similar agreement about how it should be resolved. This paper considers the view that the disorder in species classification should be resolved by a system of taxonomic governance. I argue that such a system of governance is best seen as a combination of standardisation, unification and regulation, each of which can be implemented in different forms. I investigate the forms that these three components should take for taxonomic governance by looking into two successfully governed classification systems, namely, virus classification and enzyme classification. The last part of the paper then defends the governance view against five objections.

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Notes

  1. To the extent that there is governance in the classification of bacteria and archaea, it has been slow to react to the similar challenges posed by environmental screening and metagenomic data in these fields. The International Code of Nomenclature of Prokaryotes (Parker et al. 2015) still requires a pure culture submitted to at least two collections before a new species can be named, but this rule is controversial as there is a wealth of taxonomic information available on candidate species that have not been cultured (Breitwieser et al. 2017; Hedlund et al. 2015; Konstantinidis and Rosselló-Móra 2015).

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Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Frank Zachos and an anonymous reviewer for very helpful feedback that substantially improved this forum paper.

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Work on this paper was supported by the KU Leuven Onderzoeksraad, grant 3H160214.

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  1. Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science, KU Leuven, Vesaliusstraat 2, 3000, Leuven, Belgium

    Stijn Conix

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Conix, S. In defence of taxonomic governance. Org Divers Evol 19, 87–97 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13127-019-00391-6

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