| MadSci Network: Botany |
The Linnean binomial system is still very useful scientifically, commercially and for the general public, especially gardeners, because it is an international system, is well known, and relatively simple. Its most important use for the majority of people, botanists included, is for plant naming. It is really fabulous that when you say 'Quercus alba' anyone in the world knows what plant you mean. The weakness of the Linnean System is that plants in the same family or other higher taxon may not all have the same ancestors. That is important to plant taxonomists but it is not a great concern for accurate plant naming. By analogy, let's assume new research into your family tree shows that your great great grandfather was really a Brown and not a Smith. Would you want to create confusion by suddenly changing your name from Smith to Brown for the sake of accuracy? The Deep Green project is working to develop a more accurate phylogenetic "tree" using cladistics and all sorts of new technologies such as DNA analysis. They want to group plants by common ancestors. The exact system Deep Green will employ is not known yet because they have not gathered all their data. Some plant taxonomists do want to junk the Linnaean system altogether, including binomials, but others do not. They claim that the Linnean system is wrong at least half the time because it groups species incorrectly based on new research on their genetics. It is likely that some kind of compromise will be reached and the binomial system will remain with a lot of name changes and regrouping, which happens all the time anyway. If not, we may eventually have two systems, the Linnean system for naming plants used by most people and a cladistics-based system for plant taxonomists to show how species are related genetically. References Deep Green Official Site A Deep Green Story Deep Green Rewrites Evolutionary History of Plants
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