James Hanken is leading Harvard's portion of the effort to create an Encyclopedia of Life.
Photo: Jim Harrison By meticulously categorizing life, maybe there's a chance we can save some species from extinction.
That's perhaps the source of the excitement that erupted online when a team of leading biologists and software engineers announced the Encyclopedia of Life project in early May. The
scientists plan to create an online catalog of the genome, geographic distribution, phylogenetic position, habitat, and ecological relationships of all 1.8 million known species on the planet.
To do it, they'll use the latest technologies and scientific methods – but they'll also use Carl Linnaeus' 272-year-old taxonomy system.
James Hanken, director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University where he teaches evolutionary biology will lead Harvard's role in the project. The author of over 100 scientific publications, he's also an accomplished photographer, with his work appearing in Natural History, Audubon and Playboy.
Hanken chatted with Wired News about Linnaeus' legacy in an age of genetic discovery that the father of taxonomy could not have imagined – and the movement to uproot the Linnaean system.
Wired News: What was taxonomy like before Linnaeus?
James Hanken: It wasn't scientific. There were no standards for naming. Linnaeus came up with a standard of naming things – a genus and a species, a binomial name applied to each species. That's not to say he was always correct, but before him people would take animals or plants that look superficially the same and lump together things that aren't evolutionarily close.
WN: What did Linnaeus get wrong?
Hanken: He didn't recognize some of the higher groups that we recognize today. Amphibians weren't seen as a class of animals. A lot of things that are considered amphibians today, he lumped in with fishes.
WN: Is DNA analysis the final answer to all these questions of classification?
Hanken: A real revolution has occurred with molecular biology. It hasn't made anatomy obsolete, but molecules have proven invaluable to sorting out genetic relationships. Not that molecular approaches are infallible themselves, but they are equal if not superior to anatomy.
Often, things that look identical prove to be genetically distinct and have affinities to other organisms that don't look like them at all. Their anatomical similarities came through convergent evolution.
WN: How has taxonomy evolved since Linnaeus?
Hanken: It got a jolt with Darwin. Linnaeus established his scheme and people followed it. Then Darwin and his followers promoted the idea of evolutionary descent with modification to go with that scheme, and it really accelerated.
WN: What would have happened if Linnaeus hadn't come up with that system?
Hanken: Good question. I don't know. But in the last few years, there's been an alternative – the phylogenetic code.
It's an alternative scheme of classification that puts greater weight on the position of particular organisms on the evolutionary tree, instead of naming them into discrete categories – genus and species and so forth. That's been an active debate ongoing in the last five or six years.
WN: What does that actually mean in practice?
Hanken: It's very heretical, but it's the idea that you downplay the importance of recognizing things as species and giving them discrete names. It would wreak great havoc in the public. That's not necessarily why you shouldn't adopt it, but that would be a corollary.
WN: What's your own take on the phylogenetic system?
Hanken: One of the main functions of taxonomy is stability in names. If you value that highly, then the phylogenetic code creates potential for great confusion. But phylogeneticists have a point: They want people to emphasize evolutionary relationships when you name organisms. We should find a way of conveying the information they want to include while offering alternate names.
WN: I've heard it said that the present system of naming is restrictive, and that serious taxonomists don't bother with Linnaeus' classifications.
Hanken: I don't think it's necessarily a widely shared view. Some people pay less attention than others.
WN: Do the systems need to be exclusive? Can't you have both side-by-side?
Hanken: Some people would say that's what you should be doing, but some of the people offering this theory adopt a take-no-prisoners attitude. They're not interested in compromising. They're interested in theoretical rigor.
WN: What's the benefit of their system?
Hanken: It's most helpful for someone who studies evolutionary relationships.
WN: Are there any other big changes going on?
Hanken: You'd expect that, 300 years since Linnaeus was born, we'd have a good handle on organisms that are around us. But one fact that's become very evident in the last few years is that there are tremendous numbers of species being discovered all the time. We don't have a robust, confident idea of how many species there are on Earth.
People speak of the 19th century as the age of exploration. That's when North America and Europe were sending ships all over the world, bringing back plants and animals and naming them. We think romantically of that, and we're describing more species now than then. We're living in the age of discovery. People in the field of taxonomy recognize this, but it's not well known to scientists in general or the lay public.
The science of taxonomy also remains poorly developed. It's been rather slow to take advantage of digital technology and electronics. You'd think that when somebody names a species, there would be a place where they automatically register it online. Instead you do it in a scientific paper, and for word to get out people must be aware of the journal (article) and see it.
WN: And that's where the Encyclopedia of Life comes in?
Hanken: The Encyclopedia of Life is one application of cutting-edge technology to species inventory and discovery. It's as much for laypeople as scientists, but we hope that it will be embraced by the scientific community. Scientists must participate, or it won't succeed, but we hope they'll be willing to use it as a tool.
WN: How so?
Hanken: The Encyclopedia isn't going to discover anything new. It's not conducting basic research. It's aggregating all the information available – and information is power. If you can have access to information more quickly and readily, you can do work more quickly and readily. That's how it will assist taxonomy.
If you can take information about all kinds of different organisms – birds, insects, plants, trees, terrestrial invertebrates, amphibians – you can discover patterns in their geographic distributions that you couldn't discover by looking at a handful of species.
WN: How does the Encyclopedia of Life differ (scientifically or in terms of utility) than Wikispecies and the Tree of Life web project?
Hanken: The Tree of Life web project is a resource for information regarding the phylogenetic relationships among living organisms – where a given species or group of species is located on the tree of life. EoL will provide convenient access to this information but doesn’t plan to actually do work to figure out these relationships. Indeed, we’re already working closely with the TOL project, and EoL species sites likely will include hot links to relevant pages on the TOL website. In other words, EoL will rely on TOL and other such initiatives to provide this kind of information and will direct interested people there.
Wikispecies is similar to EoL insofar as each site hopes to offer a homepage for each species of organism. Beyond that, however, they are very different. EoL will be much richer in content because of the use of aggregation technology to compile a given page and the deliberate digitization of the relevant scientific literature. EoL also will regulate much more stringently the validation of scientific content for its species pages, and will utilize lists of valid scientific species produced by professional taxonomists in deciding which species names to use. As with TOL, however, EoL is deliberately attempting to go about this in a collaborative manner.
So, for example, the EoL Steering Committee invited a member of the Wikimedia Foundation to our monthly meeting last week to brief us on Wikipedia, Wikispecies, etc., and to discuss ways that our respective organizations could work together and learn from one another’s individual experiences and expertise. The meeting was very productive and went well.
(Editors note: Read a response from the creator of the Tree of Life here.)
WN: How is the gatekeeping going to work? It's not going to be as open as Wikipedia, but you still want participation.
Hanken: We want the species sites to be a place where people can go for reliable, accurate information. In many cases, for something to get stamp of approval as reliable and accurate, that means a skilled scientist will have to review the material. We have to have some means of identifying what's garbage and what's not.
WN: What comes next in the field of taxonomy?
Hanken: It's a time of tremendous promise. Taxonomy has been slow to adopt digital technologies, and has been somewhat poorly organized, but it's beginning to change. People are realizing how much potential there is for improving how we do the science.
It's a very exciting time, but tragic too, because so many of these species are being threatened with extinction.
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What's in a Name? The Future of Life 
Order Is in the Eye of the Tagger 
Organizing the World in the Age of DNA 
Gallery: Growing the Trees of Life Bill's Excellent Ted Adventure
Wired Magazine: The Crusade Against Evolution
