[tcs-lc] Re: TCS and relationship assertions

[Gregor Hagedorn]

Donald wrote:
> Gregor's suggestion (which he can correct if I have misstated it) would be
> that in practice we start with an assumption that different taxonomists'
> concepts under the same published name are sufficiently similar that other
> researchers can start with the pragmatic assumption that they can be treated as
> congruent for most purposes.  Exact boundaries of circumscribed populations will
> vary, but (very crudely speaking) concepts are normally distributed around a
> mean concept under each name.

No need for correction, but a supplement:

One reason why in my view biology often uses a congruence hypothesis based on 
name-identity rather than exact reasoning mechanisms is that almost a continuum 
exists between:

- defined, traceable concepts with non-congruent circumscription, 
- misapplied names (fungus in New Zealand is really a different species, but 
has been listed under European name for 100 years now), 
- misidentifications (object is really a similar species, but the difference 
was not detected) and 
- out-of the way errors (copied name that appeared in the list below the one 
intended to copy, cultures of fungi were mixed or contaminated, etc.). 

Even GenBank is full of cases in the last category! Only part of that can be 
dealt with by better defining concepts. Doing so in a formal way is important.

I believe that the biological practice to only deal with circumscription 
concepts in a patchy/mosaic manner where neccessary is wise. It distinguishes 
hypothesis based science from burocracy. However, I very much look forward to 
better, more formal ways of expressing knowledge in these patches. I believe 
biology has historically done a bad job of formalizing this - sensu lato/sensu 
stricto are really insider-comments, not science. 

Gregor

PS: biology in the form of nomenclature has a large number of rules that a 
computer scientists would call definitions of "canonical form" to abstract from 
the variation of name-strings-with-author to a name-identity. The LC wiki has 
worked out a number of these rules, and there may be more. I therefore believe 
that an ID should be given to these nomenclatural objects. Each such object 
could have multiple name strings, some of which are unique, some shared with 
other objects (homonyms). Circumscriptions concepts then could refer to these. 

I believe that this is what Rich put up for discussion, which I fully endorse.--
--------------------------------------------------------
Gregor Hagedorn (G.Hagedorn at bba.de)
Institute for Plant Virology, Microbiology, and Biosafety
Federal Research Center for Agriculture and Forestry (BBA)
Königin-Luise-Str. 19           Tel: +49-30-8304-2220
14195 Berlin, Germany           Fax: +49-30-8304-2203