Taxonomy: Myths and Misconceptions by

Given the fundamental necessity of reliable taxon-omy for biology, it is surprising that taxonomy is so frequently misunderstood. Even former disciplines of “natural history ” with their roots in the taxonomic tradition frequently attack taxonomy on false grounds in spite of the dependence of such fields upon credi-ble taxonomic information. We review and refute a number of such myths and misconceptions about tax-onomy that seem to contribute to an indefensible lack of respect and support for taxonomists and their col-lections. We will discuss these myths and misconcep-tions in no particular order. Taxonomy is “descriptive”. It is unclear why being descriptive is seen as negative by some experimental biologists; without accurate descriptive work all branches of natural history would be subjective and unreliable. Taxonomy is descriptive, of course, yet much of the substance of its descriptions –characters, species and clades – is based upon explicitly testable hypotheses about sameness and group membership. Because of the nature of evolution biologists deal to a very great extent with unique organisms, groups of or-ganisms and attributes of organisms, making descrip-tive work inordinately important. That said, the hy-potheses embedded in layers of taxonomic work and their rigorously testable nature make taxonomy both hypothesis-driven and scrupulously scientific. An in-nuendo implicit in such “it’s only descriptive ” criti-cisms is that taxonomy is, therefore, somehow less sci-entific. That, however, is simply false (e.g., Gaffney