Evolution and Classification of Seed Plants

Abstract

What should taxonomists do with their time? Is it “futile to continue the task of describing biological diversity in the manner of the 18th century, writing, in a way, the slighdy premature obituaries of millions of bugs and worms and those of a few randomly selected undescribed species of plants and vertebrates” (Soule 1990)? The tropical forests are being destroyed at an alarming speed. Taxonomists cannot even keep pace with the forest machines, and the rate of “species” extinction is still steadily increasing. Bramwell (1989) and Nooteboom (1988) are clear on what our task should be: write floras, and do not worry about how things are interrelated! A flora is a basic tool in all biological work, and undoubtedly also a powerful weapon in the fight for nature conservation, so why is not everybody writing floras? Maybe there is really no intra-disciplinary conflict here. The preparation of reliable floras is dependent on available monographs, and writing monographs (at all levels) remains the most important task for systematic botanists. “Systematics is a discipline that deals with the history of life, and we forget this at peril of our professional integrity” (Stevens 1990). As long as systematics is not reduced to an arbitrary sorting of atomistic entities into convenient boxes, it is a scientific discipline. Progress is thus possible, but will inevitably mean changes in delimitation and circumscription of taxa, and taxonomic instability is irritating (Crisp and Fogg 1988). Should we stop making progress to please our fellows in other branches? No! We need to make them understand that arbitrary classifications of biological entities have little predictivity and are of restricted use.