Trouble in the relationship?
Photo by Vince Lee on Unsplash
1 The taxonomy and scientific names change a lot
As written about taxonomy, linnean binomials represents/reflects phylogeny. This means that names will change when new relationships are discovered.
Systematics doesn’t use genes, taxonomy does. Systematics of bioscience claims that genes are an important tool to reconstruct evolutionary relationships between organisms (this is systematic theory), beside other tools (e.g. morphological, chemical, etc. characters). Taxonomy is the process of actually proposing taxonomies of selected organisms, either using morphology, or genes or both, or even more.
This is a problem for horticulture, agriculture and silviculture science in particular, because you end up with many different names in various catalogs and overviews, which in turn creates problems for the many industries and others who work with cultivated forms. Tomato is mentioned e.g. now by the botanists as Solanum lycopersicum L., but not long ago it went under Lycopersicon esculentum Mill., which thus remains in many lists, but is now defined as a synonym.
2 Many cultivars have complex histories that cannot be described taxonomically
Today, taxonomic names are used in cultonomy, even where in many cases it is not possible to trace a cultivar back to just one taxon. As a rule, one tries a species, a subspecies (subsp.) or a variant (var.), but in reality the human-influenced organisms are in many cases developed far from their wild forms through hybridization between species. In some cases, there are no wild relatives left at all, such as e.g. for many varieties of cereals that have been cultivated over a very long time (they are called cultigens).
It is our intentional artificial selection, breeding and changing of organisms through a priory developed breeding programmes and not primarily the mechanisms of evolution, that have been decisive. This makes them difficult to fit into the phylogenetically based taxonomies of the life sciences, so that choosing a scientific name is really a half-truth at best.
3 Domesticated organisms create challenges for taxonomy
A key feature of the ICN Code has been the intention to phase out all cultivated plants and fungi and instead let the ICNCP deal with these. But in recent years, attempts have been made to meet the cultonomists’ needs for more suitable scientific names.
One problem is that we get an explosion of hybrid names (those with either “x” or “×”), and a large appendix with naming rules for hybrids in ICN as a result. Another problem has more to do with the basics of taxonomic thinking, according to the challenges mentioned in (1) and (2) above.
GBIF has for example done a lot of work with respect to the field of agrobiodiversity (ABD), as the key term is there, which has mainly lead to two results:
- The Report of the Task Group on GBIF Data Fitness for Use in Agrobiodiversity
- A taxon (in GBIF) called Cultivar that is “ranked” within the taxonomic hierarchy.
https://github.com/tdwg/dwc/issues/41
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultivar#Formal_definition
https://github.com/gbif/name-parser/blob/master/name-parser-api/src/main/java/org/gbif/nameparser/api/Rank.java#L
This is all very interesting, and since GBIF is a partner of the project, we will follow this closely.
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Read more here about how systematists Ronald van den Berg and Wilbert Hetterscheid solve these challenges.
Last Updated on 2023-04-03 by Karl Aakerro