[TN-Bird] [Fwd: Re: Van Remsen nails it (long)]
- From: Raincrow <raincrow@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: TNbird <tn-bird@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 01 Mar 2003 11:16:15 -0600
Thanks to James Brooks and Wallace Coffey for this very enlightening
thread, one perfectly acceptable on TNBird, as far as I'm concerned.
Liz Singley
Kingston TN
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [TN-Bird] Re: Van Remsen nails it (long)
Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2003 19:03:06 -0500
From: "Wallace Coffey" <jwcoffey@xxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: jwcoffey@xxxxxxxxxx
To: "Tenn Birds" <tn-bird@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
I suspect few of you are interested in the confidence in DNA data to
determine species limits. The scientific community is very busy working
through all this
and how to apply the exciting tool of DNA. The progress is like a
thunder
bolt.
Some do not believe there is such an absolutely entity as a "species"
but that it is a pigeon hole of convince to organizing knowledge. Some
believe it is becoming or has become outdated. As one of Dr. Robert
Zink's
students
recently said, the term species will probably long be our "currency" in
natural resource management and conservation. Zink is a DNA researcher
at
the
University of Minnesota who was formerly at LSU with Remsen.
Likewise some of you could rightfully argue that this is an
inappropriate
subject for a list like TN-Birds. As birders, we will have to spend
more
time with such thinking in order to understand the hobby of listing
"species." Since you are still with me to this point, don't feel alone
if
you are ready to
kill this message and move on. Hit the delete button as needed :-)
Since we will not be debating all of this on TN-Birds, and shouldn't, I
want
to add a few things to make what James Brooks wrote a little more useful
to
those of you who are at least slightly interested.
Dr. J. Van Remsen, curator of ornithology at the LSU Museum of Natural
History and a member of the A.O.U. Committee on Classification and
Nomenclature, is a familiar and attractive person to a number of birders
in
Northeast Tennessee. His wife is from here and is a former student of
Dr.
Fred Alsop's at East Tennessee State University. Dr. Remsen comes to
the
area from time to time and has participated on several Bristol and
Kingsport
Christmas Brid Counts. He has birded here with us in later summer. He
is
also the ornithologist who hired Rick Knight to work on the offshore oil
platforms and the Ivory-billed Woodpecker search.
More importantly, as a member of the A.O.U. check-list committee, he is
a
major thinker and scientist who helps determine what the "recognized"
common
(English) names and scientific relationship of birds are. These are the
species names that appear in our field guides and on the lists we use to
base our life lists.
With that in mind, here is the e-mail message posted to the list that
James
Brook's "mostly" lurks on since he did post just the other day. This
is
the complete text of the discussion that Brooks quoted Remsen from. Any
of
you interested can continue to read that discussion and the rest of us
can
go back to birding in Tennessee:
---------------BEGIN FORWARD REMSEN'S POST-------------
John Penhallurick wrote:
> "As I have been working through the nomenclature and taxonomy of
> bird species, I have become increasing aware of the extent to
> which currently accepted decisions on the status of taxa, as
> species and subspecies, go back to the work of James L.Peters.
>
> I have also become aware of the many occasions when Peters
> arrived at a decision without any published justification of the
> decision, save what appeared in his Checklist.
>
> These decisions were almost always in favour of lumping.
>
> In this respect, Peters was influenced profoundly by the
> Biological Species Concept. At this early stage, this essentially
> amounted to the Unidimensional BSC, which can be applied only to
> sympatric taxa.
>
> In relation to allopatric taxa, the rule was: use inference to
> make your decision.
> And this inference was almost always based on appearance.
>
> So because Charadrius alexandrinus and Charadrius nivosus looked
> similar, they were lumped.
>
> DNA-based research is increasingly finding that, apart from high
> Arctic species, Old World taxa are not conspecific with New World
> taxa.
>
> I think in the circumstances that the clinging to Peters'
> taxonomy is a mistake. We ought to question it more.
>
> John
John/NEOORN: most of what you say is true, in my opinion, but keep
in mind the "climate" of Peters' time --- bird taxonomy was a morass
of binomials and trinomials, and relationships among them were
uncertain. As Bret Whitney emphasized to me recently, the task of
identifying relationships among these taxa was the "cool" thing to do
(just the way unmasking cryptic or overlooked species-level taxa is
currently), and so Hellmayr and Peters played a major role in
revealing these associations (that we now often take for granted with
the benefit of another 50+ years of experience). Yes, Peters
especially carried it too far, but if he had known what we now know
about the importance of vocalizations etc. in species recognition
among very similar species, perhaps he would have ranked his taxa
differently.
My one real quibble with what you say is your confidence in DNA data
to determine species limits. Blind faith in genetic data for ranking
taxa as species is just as dangerous as the plover example you use
above, i.e., lumping them because they look similar. I increasingly
get the feeling that many seem to think that all we need to decide
whether two taxa are species or not is to compare a DNA sample.
Although this is certainly an oversimplification of what you yourself
wrote above, it is nonetheless a pervasive attitude. If the 2
populations in question are parapatric or sympatric, then, yes, DNA
samples will provide an outstanding measure of whether they are
exchanging genes. DNA also reveals problems of paraphyly. BUT on
the ancient problem of whether two allopatric populations are species
or not, all DNA does is place the degree of difference between the
two on a continuous scale of % sequence divergence, along which no
arbitrary threshold can be defended conceptually as an assay of
species rank, in my opinion.
--
Van Remsen
najames AT LSU.edu
LSU Museum of Natural Science
Foster Hall 119, LSU
Baton Rouge, LA 70803
---------END FORWARD REMSEN'S POST-----------
Let's go birding......
Wallace Coffey
Bristol, TN
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=========================================================
=================NOTES TO SUBSCRIBER=====================
The TN-Bird Net requires you to sign your messages with
first and last name, city (town) and state abbreviation.
-----------------------------------------------------
To post to this mailing list, simply send email to:
tn-bird@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
-----------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, send email to:
tn-bird-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
with 'unsubscribe' in the Subject field.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Topographical Maps located at http://topozone.com/find.asp
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Visit the Tennessee Ornithological Society
web site at http://www.tnbirds.org
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
TN-Bird Net Owner: Wallace Coffey, Bristol, TN
jwcoffey@xxxxxxxxxx (423) 764-3958
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