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Re: Taxonomy is a matter of evidence...most of the time


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Posted by troy h on October 16, 2002 at 17:00:30:

In Reply to: Re: Taxonomy is a matter of evidence...most of the time posted by pjay on October 15, 2002 at 16:19:49:

i'm not saying that we should willy-nilly ignore name changes. however, to suggest that we should use any name change simply because it has been published until we have evidence to the contrary is akin to asking us to all accept a hypothesis that has been supported as if it were a theory. for example, the hypothesis that dinosaurs were warm-blooded has a lot of evidence in favor of it, but when it was first published, we didn't say "now that i've published this, everyone has to agree with me in their publications until you provide evidence to the contrary".

we should instead use our reason, and if we decide to use a name counter to the most recently published, we should make a note of it, saying " prof. x. has recently elevated the western populations of species y to full species. however, until his work covers this and that point, i will maintain the conservative approach here and recognize all populations of species y as conspecific".

troy



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