[Taxacom] The Evenhuis Nirvana

[Curtis Clark]

On 2007-04-08 18:39, Ken Kinman wrote:

>     Well, there is really no such thing as nirvana in the real world,

Ken, I didn't realize you did theology as well. :-)


> As for doubts 1 and 2, 
> perhaps it would be better to go ahead and describe them and even name 
> them, and if they get synonymized in the future, so be it.  In any case, 
> your descriptions and other data may well accelerate the discovery [...]

There's an interesting phenomenon whereby the promulgation of incomplete 
or inaccurate information will cause complete and accurate information 
to be made available faster than it otherwise would. Three specific 
examples: (1) a former student assistant once explained that asking a 
programming question on a discussion board or IRC channel would usually 
get no reply, but posting an intentionally incorrect answer to the 
question would get a number of replies in short order; (2) it has been 
my experience working in teams of faculty that some members are very 
unlikely to contribute their portions of a proposal in a timely fashion, 
but if I write an inadequate draft, they will be glad to correct it 
quickly; (3) incorrect edits to Wikipedia articles are corrected at a 
much higher rate than new information is added.

One might think that this phenomenon would carry across to taxonomy, and 
in groups that are studied by many people, it often does, but 
unfortunately there are far more groups that have little attention, and 
an incomplete description or unnecessary species may stand for centuries 
before someone else bothers to look.

Ken's suggestion is still a good one, though: Even in the worst case, an 
incomplete description of a subsequently extirpated species is an 
irritant ("Why couldn't they have done a better job?") precisely because 
it provides more than the sublime ignorance of never knowing that the 
species existed.

-- 
Curtis Clark            http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/
Director, I&IT Web Development             +1 909 979 6371
University Web Coordinator, Cal Poly Pomona