กระทู้เก่า - 04843 : 

 

  [ 12/10/2548 7:37:56 ]

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 [12/10/2548 12:7:48]

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 [17/10/2548 9:22:13]

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BioCode, in contrast, proposes that botanists and zoologists each give up the separate parochial codes of naming they've developed and instead adopt a new universal BioCode, the first step in creating a single, unified registry of life.

Then there's uBio, which has sidestepped the question of codes and regulations altogether and instead aims to record every single name ever used for any organism, scientific or common, correct or incorrect, down to the last variation and misspelling, as a way of linking all information ever recorded about an organism together.

The All Species Foundation aims not only to record all names but also to find every species and describe it, all in 25 years. And then there's Wikispecies, Species 2000, the Electronic Catalogue of Names of Known Organisms and many more. Some have already come and gone, or nearly so, and others are expiring for lack of sustained funds.

So ZooBank finds itself born in the midst of a Cambrian explosion of initiatives, a proliferation not merely of Web sites and databases but of ideas about how to accomplish the task of naming and organizing all of life. And though disorder may be the most abhorrent thing to a tidy taxonomist, sometimes a little chaos can be healthy.

"Actually, I think the diversity is good," said James Mallet, an evolutionary biologist at University College London and a leader of yet another initiative known as the Taxome Project. "As an evolutionary biologist, I see great possibilities for natural selection, parasitism and predation among the various projects."

And just that kind of "nature red in tooth and claw" action is already happening, as sites and projects link, merging information, and others take up what they can use from wherever they can find it, and so on.

So let all comers step up to the plate. Why not, when the rewards are so rich? Not only did Linnaeus shape the naming of life for more than two centuries, but he also enjoyed perks including crowning himself "prince of botanists" and reviewing his own work as "a masterpiece that no one can read too often or admire too much."

His glories even include being designated as the so-called "lectotype," a kind of official scientific specimen to represent, for science and for all of time, the species Homo sapiens. Not bad for an old-time flower collector.

 [17/10/2548 9:23:10]

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