A Few Bad Scientists Are Threatening to Topple Taxonomy | Hacker News Reader

A Few Bad Scientists Are Threatening to Topple Taxonomy

smithsonianmag.com

96 pointsartsandsci25 comments

These two Australian dudes are awful, no doubt, but the whole "you might get the wrong antivenin" disaster scenario is a reach. How many people go to the hospital with a scientific name? If I ever get bit, I'll bring the the remains of the snake with me, and the nurse will say, "Yep, looks like a copperhead."

Academia's blockchain-like pyramid of citations is charming, IMHO. The researchers who matter, know what's going on. Citing these bozos, would be a pretty good bozo indicator in and of itself.

It's a reach to imagine your scenario applies to snakebite emergencies generally. Copperheads are large, distinctive snakes, their nomenclature is stable and in the temperate zones where they live, there are a relatively limited number of other venomous species to distinguish, hence you being so assured of supplying remains for a nurse to casually ID. In contrast, many tropical habitats, where snakebites are much more of a problem, have a much, much higher venomous snake species diversity (particularly of those small, fast elusive ones you barely glimpse), and questions about ID and species relationships are correspondingly more confusing.

It's not so much about always turning up with a scientific name. The whole effort from doctor-patient communication, to animal control, to the production, supply and procurement of specific antivenins, needs to be conducted within as stable and precise nomenclatural framework as possible.

Snakes are just one example here, there are many examples of research programmes being derailed by faulty taxonomy, with big impacts on everything from crop production to theoretical work in ecology.

> particularly of those small, fast elusive ones you barely glimpse

How is taxonomy going to help you if you don't get enough identification time and don't have enough herpetology to identify the snake's species and genus in the first place? The vast majority of people don't use taxonomic terms: "Doctor, can you help me? I have a canis familiaris bite..."

Read my paragraph number two?

If you have absolutely no information about what bit you, diagnostics look at habitat, bitemark characteristics, venom reaction, and of course serological tests / enzyme immunological assay can be conclusive. Taxonomy is critical generally, if the patient doesn't have an ID it's not as if taxonomy becomes irrelevant.

Copperheads are also not particularly dangerous, to the point where antivenom is usually not administered, as the risk of a negative immune reaction is worse than leaving it untreated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agkistrodon_contortrix#Venom

>but the whole "you might get the wrong antivenin" disaster scenario is a reach. How many people go to the hospital with a scientific name?

Here's an example: I keep multiple tarantulas as pets (yes it's a thing). If I got bit by one that has medically significant venom, I'm 100% going to tell the ER exactly what species it was with it's scientific name (all are kept in labeled enclosures).

but will the ER know what to do with that name?

I mean I'd assume it would be of at least some help. Their venom isn't deadly at the very least.

Why in God's name do you keep multiple venomous animals as pets? You even admit you might get bit someday. Do you even know that your hospital carries tarantula anti-venom?

Some people collect cars or guns, others tarantulas.

Yeah, the article over dramatizes the issue, but within basically acceptable bounds imo, and they do provide other more reasonable problems that can crop up as a result of conflicting naming schemes.

Also replying with a string of expletives, and "heaps of bloody merit", is so Australian it's practically charming.

> Citing these bozos, would be a pretty good bozo indicator in and of itself.

You do know that good researchers frequently cite other research while discrediting it, right?

Other researchers being misguided and stupid and wrong still isn't the same as them being vandals, though. I'd be surprised if the aforementioned bozos have many citations (aside from maybe citing each other?)

> That definition leaves room for what few would call science: self-publishing. (...) “No other field of science, other than taxonomy, is subject to allowing people to self-publish.”

Actually, the sharing of non-peer-reviewed works (preprints) is fairly common in STEM, and is spreading to other disciplines [0]. The main difference is that they usually on to be peer-reviewed - although not always.

That said, I'm not sure if the solution would be to only allow peer-reviewed work in the taxonomy, as defining what is proper peer review is difficult as well. For example, there are plenty of predatory journals that will arrange a rather symbolic peer review process for you as long as you pay.

But it's an interesting problem, to say the least.

[0] https://cos.io/about/news/six-new-preprint-services-join-gro...

While sharing of pre-prints is commonly done, nothing official is ever done based on non-reviewed studies. If they are later published, then the pre-prints are treated equivalently, because they have the same data. However, pre-prints that do not make it through peer review, or conclusions that exist within a pre-print but are removed in the final version, are treated as non-existent.

It seems reasonable to treat taxonomy with the same rigor. If you can't convince your peers that you found something new, why should you get the distinction of making the name for it?

Maybe these guys are partaking in "taxonomic vandalism" for the wrong reasons, but I think there might be a place for a reminder that genetic variation, while not continuous, is far more fine grained than our taxonomies, and that relying on those taxonomies too heavily might lead to mistakes.

The article points out that:

> this biological classification system has allowed scientists around the world to study organisms without confusion or overlap for nearly 300 years.

You have to wonder how the system would look now if 300 years ago they had had the understanding and techniques (e.g. bioinformatics) that we have today.

Taxonomies certainly do change with genetic data. The big debates are focused on reconstructing ancestry (phylogenies) but this applies to species definitions as well. This issue of vandalism is orthogonal to the science of taxonomy.

> Naming species forms the foundation of biology

No, it really doesn't. It really, really doesn't. People study biology all the time and get useful levels of skill without ever being aware of species classification. Taxonomy is a part of biology, but it's not a foundation of it. If you want to study physics, you're not going to get very far without 'distance' or 'time', but you can learn heaps of useful biology without ever uttering a latin phrase.

We, as humans, have a long history of studying biology with little in the way of taxonomy: hunting and farming. The quoted bit is an annoying premise for the article, because the whole thing is written as if biology itself is potentially going to crumble, just to add a bit of needless drama.

I've moved from environmental biology to biomedical biology in my career. Certainly biomedical types don't care much about classification. But that's because they traditionally only deal with humans, rats, monkeys and mice. But classification really matters once you get beyond that. Hell, biomedical science is having a crash course in classification due to the current interest in the microbiome. It really matters if a bacterium is a Firmicute or a Bacteroidetes.

Science statement of the week:

"In response to questions about the legitimacy of his journal, Hawkeswood delivered a string of expletives directed towards his critics, and contended that Calodema has “heaps of merit.”"

The weakness of the scientific names taxonomy isn't so much that people can get names added too easily, it's that the whole thing is subject to change.

As we learn about the genetics (phylogeny) of plants and animals, they get renamed from the original morphology-based names/locations.

https://florabase.dpaw.wa.gov.au/articles/dryandra-banksia/w...

Maybe once everything is verified by DNA analysis it will settle down, but then we will just continue fighting over what degree of mutation comprises a new species.

Incredible, and even down to the speech patterns this Hoser fellow sounds like a pretty typical troll. Unfortunately the herpetologists seem to be not unlike fairly typical victims of trolls in that they are very much on the back foot and having to wait on slow bureaucracy. At the end of the day it does sound like another form of walled garden, this time a restricted herpetological taxonomic database, is probably going to be the way to go.

He hasn't published for a few years as evidenced by this list:

https://species.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Terrence_Hoser

http://www.smuggled.com/AJHIP1.htm

Still publishing.

4 hours in, and nobody went for "if they have trouble with this, wait until they try cache invalidation…"?

Very disappointed. [https://martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html]

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