David Wright wrote:

>A practical question regarding this matter: does the AOU "enforce" the
>decisions of the checklist committee by requiring authors publishing in
>the Auk to use the nomenclature decided on by the committee? If so,
>doesn't this prevent some authors from accurately expressing their own
>hypotheses, or from acting on their own decisions about which species-taxa
>hypotheses are best supported by evidence? If not, doesn't this kind of
>defeat the purpose of having a checklist? A little diversity in
>nomenclature is intellectually healthy and honest (though it might keep
>listers up at night).

All the major North American journals request that authors use current AOU
Check-list names, but, from my observations, the editors are not always
rigorous in "policing" this, probably because neither editor nor reviewers
are up on nomenclature. It's expressly stated (as I remember) that
taxonomic/systematic papers are exempt from this guideline, which then
makes it quite reasonable to me. The committee was formed to promote
stability in nomenclature (perhaps at a time when different authors were
using different names willy-nilly; I don't know), stability meaning "one
name for one bird." Obviously that names may change again and again, based
on a variety of kinds of decisions, but us common folk are informed of that
on an official basis.

Interestingly, it may be only in birds that there are committees to
determine the official names of organisms. There are published lists for
North American mammals, fishes, amphibians, and reptiles, but I don't think
they are treated as official, in the sense that these names *must* be used.
But it still makes sense to have the bookkeeping, for example for work
with endangered species, where the names used should surely be
standardized.

In the Dragonfly Society of the Americas, we are deciding right now whether
there ought to be a committee to rule on nomenclatorial proposals and
changes. Probably it won't happen, but the fact that we are talking about
it indicates some wish that the names be standardized--for convenience, if
nothing else.

Dennis Paulson phone: (206) 756-3798
Slater Museum of Natural History fax: (206) 756-3352
University of Puget Sound e-mail: dpaulson at ups.edu
Tacoma, WA 98416