Kevin de Queiroz, a zoologist and curator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History backs a movement to change the way we name species.
I quoted him in a story on Carolus Linnaeus, who's 300th birthday would have been today. But I couldn't fit in all of the interesting stuff he had to say, so here it is:
I am part of the group that is putting together the PhyloCode. Whether it's supposed to replace the "Linnaean System" depends on what you mean by that. We are NOT proposing to replace Linnaeus's classification/taxonomy—that's been happening for hundreds of years.
Some of Linnaeus's groups, or taxa, have survived just fine ( e.g., Mammalia), others have not (e.g., most of his classes of plants). The PhyloCode also is NOT proposing to eliminate the taxonomic ranks (Kingdom, Phylum, Class, etc.), which stem largely from the work of Linnaeus (though there are some supporters of the PhyloCode who also advocate what may be called "rank-free taxonomy," which does propose to eliminate the ranks). Nor are we proposing to eliminate binomial species names. What we ARE proposing to do is replace the rules governing the names of clades (groups of species that share an exclusive common ancestry).
The traditional rules (which are published in books called the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature, etc.) are based on the taxonomic ranks, and under those rules, the names of clades are much more strongly tied to ranks than they are to groups/clades. This is unlike how ranks functioned for Linnaeus, who used ranks purely for taxonomic purposes (to reflect hierarchical organization) and not for nomenclatural purposes ( i.e., ranks didn't affect the form or use of names). Under the PhyloCode, names (e.g., "Varanoidea") are more strongly tied to clades/groups than they are to ranks, and thus the PhyloCode functions more like nomenclature did in the times of Linnaeus.
We are advocating this approach for a number of reasons (in no particular order): 1) It makes more sense to tie the names to evolutionary concepts of groups than to ranks, since most biologists agree both that evolution is a unifying biological theory and that ranks are artificial. More generally, there has been a movement away from rank-based to tree-based approaches in biology, and the PhyloCode is just the nomenclatural manifestation of this movement. 2) The PhyloCode works better in terms of promoting nomenclatural stability and continuity, which are avowed goals of the traditional nomenclatural codes, since it is not sensitive to changes in ranks. Under the traditional rules, when the rank of a clade is changed, the name also has to change, even if the composition of the group is identical. That doesn't happen under the PhyloCode (see below). 3) It works better from an informatics perspective, because the phylogenetic definitions upon which it is based are objective and can therefore be understood by computers. In contrast, traditional definitions contain a subjective element—the assignment of ranks—that prevents them from being fully understood by computers. These are some of the main reasons.
For a more detailed explanation, see the Preface to the PhyloCode ( www.ohiou.edu/phylocode/preface.html under Advantages of Phylogenetic Nomenclature.
Consider the recent finding that termites, order Isoptera, are closely related to wood-eating roaches, order Blatteria—in other words, that these groups are nested one within the other, rather than being separate or mutually exclusive). Under the traditional codes, one logical course of action would be to demote the termites in rank from order to family, as has been suggested by some recent authors. The name of the group then has to change from Isoptera to Termitidae, the group formerly named Termitidae becomes Termitinae (similar changes happen to all the other traditional families), Termitinae becomes Termitini, and on down—in other words, there is a whole cascade of name changes (and note also that the name Termitidae changes from the name of a subgroup of termites to that of the group of all termites). A similar situation would happen with Serpentes and Amphisbaenia, which might also be demoted to families under the tree we've been talking about; alternatively, all of the traditional lizard families might be raised in rank. In either case, lots of unnecessary name changes would occur. Under the PhyloCode, those sorts of changes wouldn't happen. The same names would be applied to the same groups (Isoptera, Serpentes, Amphisbaenia). The only thing that would change would be our ideas about how the groups are related ( e.g., we used to think that Isoptera and Batteria were mutually exclusive; now we think that Isoptera is nested within Blatteria).
