[pbs] Family Information

Nhu Nguyen xerantheum at gmail.com
Wed Nov 19 15:34:53 EST 2008


On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 11:10 AM, <totototo at telus.net> wrote:


> It's time for the botanists to pull their act together and start
> legislating,
> instead of the current everyman-for-himself approach.



The problem as I see it goes beyond botanists. Taxonomists in general are
very highly opinionated with their "group". When they try to come together,
there's usually a hot debate due to the highly opinionated foundation of the
field. For certain questions, it's important to have a higher
classification, but for the end user (gardeners and non-taxonomists alike),
the species unit is the least artificial. But even at that level, there are
still hot debates on what constitute a species. It is clear in the age of
genomics is that a single species concept cannot be used to encompass all
living things.

Nhu
Berkeley, CA - it's about to rain, finally!


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