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Insect taxonomy in species-rich countries: the way forward?

Taxonomia de insetos em países ricos em espécies: que caminho seguir?

There are two extremes in taxonomic behavior - publishing quickly as new taxa become available, and waiting a lifetime in the hope of publishing results that cannot be faulted. Neither of these extremes meets the needs of contemporary biologists in furthering our understanding of the evolution and maintenance of biological diversity. Part of the reason for these extremes is our failure to define suitable objectives for taxonomy. Instead of emphasising the units of biological diversity, we should concentrate on investigating patterns, structural, biological, ecological, temporal, and geographical, because it is these patterns that will generate novel ideas about the evolutionary history of organisms, and that will be most likely to be of interest to the future of our own species. To investigate these patterns, we need to give greater thought to ensuring that our methods of data acquisition are consistent with our methods of data analysis. Even if we take seriously as our objective the description of all living species, then we should be devising methods of sampling natural diversity that are statistically acceptable, not haphazard. However, the following comments, credited to Willis Jepson (1867-1946) in the latest edition of the Jepson Manual of Higher Plants of California, seem appropriate to our problems as insect taxonomists: "The botanist's objective is a furtherance of knowledge of living plants. He wishes to discover new facts and establish new principles. If wise, he will never try to produce a work which is perfect, complete and final. Any such work would be a paradox and at cross purposes with our knowledge of living things and our ideas of endless evolution associated with them. Completion, perfection, finality, represent an anomaly, a contradiction in the field of biology. The far seeing botanist will strive to do work which is inspiring, productive of thought and promoting the soundest progress, so that botanical science will ever advance into new and more fruitful fields".

Insecta; biodiversity; systematics; tropical biology


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