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A Few Bad Scientists Are Threatening To Topple Taxonomy (smithsonianmag.com)
From a report: To study life on Earth, you need a system. Ours is Linnaean taxonomy, the model started by Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus in 1735. Linnaeus's two-part species names, often Latin-based, consist of both a genus name and a species name, i.e. Homo sapiens. Like a library's Dewey Decimal system for books, this biological classification system has allowed scientists around the world to study organisms without confusion or overlap for nearly 300 years. But, like any library, taxonomy is only as good as its librarians -- and now a few rogue taxonomists are threatening to expose the flaws within the system. Taxonomic vandals, as they're referred to within the field, are those who name scores of new taxa without presenting sufficient evidence for their finds. Like plagiarists trying to pass off others' work as their own, these glory-seeking scientists use others' original research in order to justify their so-called "discoveries." "It's unethical name creation based on other people's work," says Mark Scherz, a herpetologist who recently named a new species of fish-scaled gecko. "It's that lack of ethical sensibility that creates that problem." The goal of taxonomic vandalism is often self-aggrandizement. Even in such an unglamorous field, there is prestige and reward -- and with them, the temptation to misbehave. "If you name a new species, there's some notoriety to it," Thomson says. "You get these people that decide that they just want to name everything, so they can go down in history as having named hundreds and hundreds of species." The problem may be getting worse, thanks to the advent of online publishing and loopholes in the species naming code. With vandals at large, some researchers are less inclined to publish or present their work publicly for fear of being scooped, taxonomists told me. "Now there's a hesitation to present our data publically, and that's how scientists communicate," Thomson says. "The problem that causes is that you don't know who is working on what, and then the scientists start stepping on each other's toes."
I know blockchain is a bit tired at this point, but this sounds like the right sort of application for it. In order to successfully publish you would have to get enough people to accept your contribution. Because, as has been shown time and again, peer-review publications are not acting as the gatekeepers they make themselves out to be.
http://www.horg.com/
From the article:
Linnaeus's two-part species names, often Latin-based, consist of both a genus name and a species name, i.e. Homo sapiens.
Why Homo sapiens? The fact that they chose a species that includes white male christians should not go unchallenged. Very problematic. How convenient that they left out Homo erectus, a much more wholesome species.
Taxonomic vandals?
Could you name a few of them?
fake history & heritage fairytail no longer holding hostages (us) attention,, authored by a few inbred psychos' hired goons,, neverwas is where we're scheduled to depart to.. cease fire stand down,, there's moms & babys in (what's left) of all our towns.. sing along.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvy2k434Klk
n/t
Well! I am highly offended that you would consider being called a Vandal derogatory and hence having to point out that it's being racist!
It's like saying White bread is bad for you or White sugar or Brown sugar. As a matter of fact, I am going to file a complaint with the European courts against Nestle for using "Brown sugar" in their recipes!
Am I doing this right? Don't mind me, I LOVE screwing with my Berkeley family members in this way.
The Vandals haven't been a people for 1500 years, you Neanderthal goth.
No one cares when said ethnic group dispersed and was integrated into other cultures nearly 1500 years ago.
Naming animals is now a criminal act. What will Liberals think up next.
Where do the mutants and chimeras created by Crispr fit into any scheme?
That's exactly right. Not only that we should make it a punishable offense to say villain or sinister. After all, in doing so, we are vilifying whole communities.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
One is brown with black and red spots, while the other is brown with red and black spots.
Totally different!
The negative stereotype thing is stupid anyway. Gypsies engaged in a lot of petty theft, and Jews were often moneylenders and efficient merchants. American Indians often had conflicting ideas of property rights from white people.
The truth hurts.
Assimilated or appropriate? Nay murdered by the evil white man. Is there no end to their depravity?
/sarc for you idiotic SJWs
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
That sounds barbaric.
The best solution is to have a professional society that elects boards to review submissions for official taxonomical names. If it is true that there are just a few bad actors, they can be blacklisted and their names circulated to the media at large, preventing them from claiming the right to name a new "discovery" that they are attempting to hijack from another researcher or group. The society could also publish clear rules about naming and who has the right to name. Once it is clearly delineated, violators can be rightly blacklisted from ever making official, new names.
I suspect, though it is not spelled out in the article that this is likely not much of a problem in the US or Europe, but in other regions of the world where there is less funding and more pressure on scientists to produce results, and less penalty for stealing other people's research.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
Know when to use i.e. and when to use e.g.
e.g.=exempli gratia="For example"
i.e.=id est="that is"
A bad browser e.g. internet explorer
But this crowd can tolerate such things better than this grammar nazi can.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
For example, the six types of Rinos:
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
This is an odd post for the Slashdot crowd as systematics is a somewhat esoteric field even among biologists. The truth is that there have always been wars between the "splitters" and the "lumpers," the former happily naming lots of new species while the latter arguing against such foolishness. The thing is that the only people who care about such nuances are the systematists themselves and maybe ecologists who are trying to use their naming system to classify ecosystems, etc. What I've found maddening is that systematists often seemed to care little about the definition of "species." If you have a continuum of organisms with slightly varying morphology, where do you draw species lines? Can they interbreed? Lots of basic biology ignored in the mad dash to name everything. It's a hard problem.
Before you go rushing to the hospital in search of antivenin, you’re going to want to look up exactly what kind of snake you’re dealing with. But the results are confusing. According to the official record of species names, governed by the International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), the snake belongs to the genus Spracklandus. What you don’t know is that almost no taxonomists use that name. Instead, most researchers use the unofficial name that pops up in Wikipedia and most scientific journal articles: Afronaja. ...This might sound like semantics. But for you, it could mean the difference between life and death.
Seriously, who the hell would walk into a hospital and simply mention the genus of the snake that bit them? Someone mauled by a bear arriving at a hospital wouldn't say a member of the Ursus genus mauled me. Assuming they had enough time to wiki-search the snake while they're rushed to the hospital, they'd barge in with a picture of the snake that bit them and ask for an antidote. If for some reason, the bitten victim is in some sort of delirious Hodor-like state and is unable to communicate any words other than "Spracklandus, Spracklandus , Spracklandus !!", then we'd also have to assume the doctor is unable to research this and gets the wrong snake. And then we'd have to assume that the confirmed snake that bit the patient is visually close enough for the confirmation to be technically the wrong snake, but somehow the anti-venom that's administered is too different to be effective from the actual snake, and the patient dies. And then if this did happen, it would happen once as a freak accident, and policy would change to avoid this scenario from happening in the future.
There's so many levels of unbelievably stupid with this possible scenario. If this is the best worst scenario they can come up with to reassure the readers of the importance of taxonomy - well this leads me to believe it's far less important than I originally assumed.
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
... maybe some kind if computer system where an original author could plant a flag claiming IP?
Just a thought.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
One bad taxonomist don't spoil the whole bunch, girl.
#DeleteChrome
> villain or sinister
Villeins or villains were people who lived in villages, otherwise crofters or serfs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villein.
Sinister refers to left handed people.
Captcha 'nastiest'
Butthurt snowflake
Hu? Am I the only one who considers him self a memeber of Homo Genius? Or would that be Genii?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Here and there.
When you survey all the groundhogs in a given area, inevitably you will note a series of normal distributions in the observable characteristics of the species. You might observe that on that hilltop over there, the groundhogs have slightly longer ears than their fellows on the adjacent flat ground. As this article points out, a biologist will be irresistibly tempted to proclaim a new subspecies, Joseph Blow's Long-Eared Groundhog. When Dr. Blow submits his paper, he modestly hopes that the name he bestows, Marmota longaauris blowii, will survive peer review and bestow upon him the tiny bit of immortality that will keep him on the tenure track at State U.
But now suppose that this is Kern County, California, and you're an activist running People's Earth Resistance, which as an advocacy for "rewilding" and "decivilizing" is fanatically opposed to developing anything whatsoever. You stumble upon Dr Blow's paper and observe that the long-eared groundhogs, whether they are a real species or not, are now your ideal excuse for filing an injunction against California High-Speed Rail. Judges and lawyers, not being scientists, have no way of telling an academic scam when they see it. And, children, this is why our country can't build anything anymore.
Trump IS a bad president though.
I still support him far FAR more than that fucktard Hillary though.
Stop living in a binary world, my sweet child. Not everything is Left or Right. In fact, if you associate with either of those, you are quite frankly retarded.
I discovered it in Silicon Valley. It eats a lot, has greasy skin and appears unable to walk.
Used to be people were divided up on clear racial or national lines. Today they get divided up based on gender preference and skin discoloration. I mean if we can say hispanic people are no longer white because they are a little bit more brown than Nordic people, we can certainly claim every brindle great dane is a seperate species from a fawn colored great dane or a spotted dane. Yes every single variation on an animals pigment is a great excuse to get a new species named after your discovery.
I am excited to welcome our new nation of cis gendered trasnhomophobic latino jewish aryans into the fold of protected human species and call you a racist because you have never hired any cis gendered transhomophobic latino jewish aryans.
Hope your day against the wall comes soon!
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.