Taxonomy: A Discipline Central to Integrative Biology

Taxonomists contribute to science in three ways: recognition of taxa, classification of taxa, and in-tegration of information on taxa. Recognition of taxa is first performed at the species level. The fact that taxonomy at the species level is regarded as descriptive, rather than utilizing hypothesis testing, is perhaps why it is difficult for biologists other than taxonomists to understand taxonomy as a science, hence the low reputation of taxonomy. Most biologists consider, and refer to, as "sci-ence " only the disciplines of biology using hypothesis testing. Although a large part of a taxonomic paper is dedicated to description, however, taxonomy is itself a science based on hypothesis testing. If you wonder whether the specimen before you belongs to a described species or not, you first adopt a hypothesis that the specimen is an undescribed species, then begin to test this hypothe-sis using comparative morphology, distributional data, or any other tools available. You observe the specimen, describe it morphologically, compare it with those species close to it, decide that it is an undescribed species, name it, and finally publish a paper on the new species. Taxonomy has been misunderstood by people as merely descriptive, but in fact, it uses hypothesis testing in addi-tion to description, and thus is as scientific as disciplines of biology other than taxonomy. In an