| There are two extremes in taxonomic behavior - publishing quickly as new taxa become available, and waiting a lifetime in the hope of publishing results that cannot be faulted. Neither of these extremes meets the needs of contemporary biologists in furthering our understanding of the evolution and maintenance of biological diversity. Part of the reason for these extremes is our failure to define suitable objectives for taxonomy. Instead of emphasising the units of biological diversity, we should concentrate on investigating patterns, structural, biological, ecological, temporal, and geographical, because it is these patterns that will generate novel ideas about the evolutionary history of organisms, and that will be most likely to be of interest to the... |
