FROM THE PRESIDENT
The Names of Life
You, members of our community of research scholars and engineers,
please help! Nature, with her prodigious diversity of life, reveals
herself unlabeled. When generated (born, hatched, budded, laid,
germinated or otherwise produced), a being like an infant lacks a
name, bar code or other identifier. In the tropics, where life's
maximal abundance is, the young offspring (seedling, hatchling,
larva, zoospore, myxocyst, swarmer or germling) remains unrecognized
and nameless unless scientifically described.
Estimates vary from 3 million to 100 million for the number of
extant species, yet fewer than 2 million species of plants, fungi,
animals, protoctists and bacteria enjoy Latin binomial descriptions:
Genus and species. We, Homo sapiens, have
named the life around us: the garden pea, Pisum sativum;
black bread mold, Rhizopus niger; the mosquito-transmitted
protoctist of malaria, Plasmodium vivax, known to have a
remnant chloroplast; the colon bacterium Escherichia coli.
Carl von Linné (Linnaeus), never an evolutionist (see
page 311), classified all his nearly 10,000 species in
either of two Regnae (Kingdoms): Plant or Animal. Fewer than 250,000
fossils—most are "large microbes," gorgeous
protoctists: foraminifera, radiolaria, coccolithophores or
diatoms—are named in the paleontological literature.
Of some 15,000 named species of prokaryotes (cells that lack
chromosomes in membrane-bounded nuclei—bacteria sensu
lato), the vast majority are cyanobacteria: oxygenic
photosynthetic organisms with chlorophyll a. My call for
help is illustrated by these blue-green primary producers, who make
nearly all of our food and oxygen. Linnean tradition classified them
as plants properly studied in botany. Every naturalist prior to and
even subsequent to Linnaeus retains the Plant-Animal dichotomy.
To follow current rules of naming is intrinsically impossible! The
bacterial nomenclature code can contradict both the botanical and
the zoological codes. The mycologists, fungi experts, have virtually
seceded from the plant kingdom and made their own rules.
Serpulina is a genus name for a snake, a fungus and a
spirochete. No wonder! It means serpent-shape.
Ochromonas danica, a swimming alga, provides a horrible
example of confusion at the highest levels. A plant in the phylum
Chrysophyta (botany), the same exact organism is an animal in the
Class Phytomastigophora, phylum Protozoa (zoology). Logic and
molecular data dictate that Ochromonas is neither animal
nor plant: It is a protoctist! Those who study protoctists,
nucleated microorganisms and their immediate descendants
exclusive of animals, plants and fungi, are disenfranchised. Our
allegiances are divided between protozoology, phycology,
parasitology, mycology, protistology, plant pathology and myriad
other professional societies and their journals. In this age of
scientific specialization, no Linnaeus can identify, name, describe
and classify even one thousand species. The semantic changes
advocated by the PhyloCode, which uses a conceptually flawed
topology of evolutionary trees, will hopelessly augment confusion
and disdain for taxonomy. (See for yourself, page 311.)
What to do? I invite you members to enable Sigma Xi to lead an
international commission, with eclectic taxonomic experts who have
spent their own lives engaged in the study of life in nature. Such
wise senior scientists as Bryce Kendrick, mycologist; Peter Raven,
botanist; Peter Hirsch and Stjepko Golubic, prokaryotologists; John
Corliss, protistologist; and Robert Higgins, zoologist, are
competent to unite the plethora of field biologists and
genomic/computer experts to conform practices that name and document
all of Nature's prodigality.