Naming taxa from cladograms: some confusions, misleading statements, and necessary clarifications.

Abstract

Hillis (2006) recently published a rebuttal of my analysis (Dubois, 2006c) of a paper by Hillis and Wilcox (2005) on the taxonomy and nomenclature of American ranid frogs. His paper consists not only in a reply to my paper, as it contains in fact three distinct kinds of statements: (1) an attempt to "save" the new generic nomina proposed by Hillis and Wilcox (2005) from being considered nomina nuda under the Code; (2) another plea for the superiority of the Phylocode over the Code, especially as regards the absence of a Rule of Coordination and the substitution of "phylogenetic definition" of nomina to the use of onomatophores for the allocation of nomina to taxa; (3) a plea for "taxonomic stability" in order not to upset the traditional use of nomina and to please users of electronic data bases. These three points are here commented, as follows: (1) even with the best goodwill, under the rules of the Code it is possible to "save" only three or four of the seven new nomina of Hillis and Wilcox (2005), the others being indeed nomina nuda; furthermore, three of these seven nomina are definitively useless and redundant, being junior objective synonyms of other generic nomina; (2) the well-known arguments against the Phylocode do not need to be repeated in detail once again, the most important one being that replacement of a secular nomenclatural system by another one, whose theoretical and practical superiority is highly questionable, would cause considerable chaos and detract taxonomists from their urgent task of accelerating the collection, study and description of the living species of our planet; (3) the claim for taxonomic and nomenclatural stability ignores the importance of the taxonomic impediment and sends a misleading message to the scientific community and to society as a whole: in the present situation of our knowledge, taxonomic stability is ignorance, and the science of taxonomy would have much to lose to adapt its concepts and practices to the needs of databases at the expense of scientific quality. It is once again stressed that, for the quality and accuracy of communication between evolutionary biologists, and above all with other biologists and non-biologists, it is urgent that scientific periodicals impose the use of different systems of notation of nomina following distinct nomenclatural systems, such as the Code and the Phylocode.