Towards taxonomy's 'glorious revolution'
05 December 2002

Nature 420, 461 (2002) © Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

Towards taxonomy's 'glorious revolution'

Sir – My commentary "Challenges for taxonomy" (Nature 417, 17–19; 2002), in which I argued for unitary, web-based taxonomies, has stimulated a lively debate. In Correspondence, K. Thiele and D. Yeates (Nature 419, 337; 2002) make the important point that, unlike stars or genes, species and other taxa are hypotheses, not facts. A taxonomic name is thus a shorthand for this hypothesis, but it is also the key that indexes all the biological information on that taxon.

I agree wholeheartedly that any unitary taxonomy must recognize this duality. That is why I suggested that while the 'current web revision' would present only a single taxonomy for the user community, any alternative hypothesis would by right be lodged on the website and possibly enter a future revision. I believe a unitary taxonomy can be authoritative without being authoritarian.

In another Correspondence, I was disappointed that the high command of London's Natural History Museum found so little merit in these ideas (S. Knapp et al., Nature 419, 559; 2002), but I fear I must have explained them poorly. I do not seek to "throw out the past mechanisms of doing systematics and begin anew in a revolutionary 'brave new world'", nor to do away with the order and stability conferred by type specimens, nor to belittle the major taxonomic web projects already in existence. I think we should tinker as little as possible with the process of taxonomy, although my proposals for the products of taxonomy are more radical. However, exploring whether they might work for one group or for a few groups is only a small, reversible step.

Taxonomy as currently practised works and we need much more of it. It is one of the triumphs of modern science. But unless it looks to its end-users and provides them with products that they will both use and actively campaign for (and I believe this can be done while maintaining the subject's core methodology), I worry deeply that it will lose out in the intense competition in the sciences for funds.

I wrote that one of the advantages of unitary taxonomies is that they are "evolutionary, not revolutionary", and so was amused to be labelled a revolutionary. But there are revolutions and revolutions, and while taxonomy does not need the 1789 French version with its ensuing reign of terror, perhaps it does need something like England's 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688.

H. C. J. Godfray
NERC Centre for Population Biology, Imperial College at Silwood Park, Ascot, Berkshire SL5 7PY, UK