At 09:40 AM 8/18/99 -0700, Korpi, Raymond wrote:

Field guides are not a scientific document per
>se, they are an identification guide aimed at a general audience (with NG3,
>the general audience is assumed to be a bit more bird savvy than the
>Peterson guide's audience). Such changes in classification will take some
>time to find their way fully into guides.

A decade seems excessive to me, but see below for a more extreme example.

>Especially with big birds like ducks and vultures, there are physical and
>behavioral characteristics that birders associate with certain species that
>make the grouping of these together on these characteristics more important
>than the science.

Grouping things by physical or behavioral similarity is defensible and
some field guides do this, but NG3 is not one of them. Otherwise one would
find the loons and coots with the ducks. NG3 explicitly states that its
presentaion follows natural relationships, as perceived by the A.O.U.,
which certainly deserves most of the blame for being a decade out of date.

>In the mid 1880s, even as he had chaired the first AOU Check-List committee,
>Elliott Coues kept the order within his Key to North American Birds in the
>same order as he had in the 1870s. While he did give an appendix to show
>the relationship between the two guides, Coues realized that some of his
>audience would be confused by a major overhaul of his order. He stated (I
>paraphrase here) that it's better not to introduce the entirety of the
>change all at once--people have grown used to certain orders.

I guess I just don't agree with this philosophy at all. When I was a
beginning birder, the order didn't matter to me and the most useful thing
for the short term would have been to group them by size or color or
habitat. As an intermediate birder, I'm sufficently familiar with groupings
that if the sequence were changed, I would notice and would probably wonder
about why the change had occurred, which seems like a desirable outcome. I
know how to use an index if I don't know where to find something. If I were
an advanced birder, I think I would find it even more annoying that a
checklist or field guide would intentionally propagate outdated information.


>Plates cost money to redraw, and some of the order is not the same as the
>apparent logic of relationship in the field (teals are the same size, and
>it's convenient to have them close together).

This argument makes sense for changes among closely related species, but
my experience is that field guides are much better at keeping up with these
little changes (NG3 claims 80 new species) than with changes in
higher-order classifications, which would involve changes in the sequence
of the plates, but not usually in the plates themselves.

Field guide editors make
>these choices based upon audience knowledge, and the history of guides
>reflects this.

How is the audience to become more knowledgable if they aren't exposed to
current information?

The problem is not confined to ornithologists or to general audiences.
Consider the classification of the hodgepodge of lower organisms we refer
to as "protists", a group for which field guides barely exist and which
rarely if ever draw a general audience. When Ernst Haeckel introduced the
term "protist" in 1866, it was probably a fairly radical concept that an
organism might be something other than a plant or animal. So radical,
apparently, that 100 years later the concept was still missing from my 7th
grade curriculum, although fortunately by 9th grade we got new textbooks
that included it. For 20 years or so it has been pretty clear that the
"protist kingdom" should be subdivided into several kingdoms, and for at
least 10 years we have a had a pretty good idea of what some of those
subgroups are. Nevertheless very few college biology texts mention any of
these new kingdoms. (Given the general lack of knowlegde about protists, it
seems hard to argue that this happens out of a desire to preserve familiar
taxonomic concepts.) The same undergraduate texts will be surprisingly
up-to-date on AIDS, gene therapy, crop engineering, and even gene
imprinting (not the Konrad Lorenz variety), a topic that seemed completely
esoteric to me as a genetics graduate student a mere 9 years ago. The
impact of molecular methods on taxonomy/systematics is just as current and
exciting as these other topics, but for some reason there is a
long-established tradition of treating taxonomy as a static (and
uninteresting) science.
As I noted in my previous post, classifications suffer from the perception
that they are boring catalogues rather than exciting hypotheses, a
perception which is exacerbated by publications that intentionally stifle
the most interesting current hypotheses. They also suffer from a desire for
"tidiness". New classifications rarely are immediately accepted wholesale
and frequently have loose ends and unresolved data. People like Elliot
Coues worry about this confusing their audience and so apparently prefer to
misinform them with an outdated but tidy structure instead.
As a former biology instructor, I appreciate the need to present concepts
as simply as possible, but the world is a confusing place and it doesn't
help to hide this from one's audience. Audiences draw their ideas about
what is interesting and exciting in significant part from what is presented
in an interesting and exciting manner. If the A.O.U. and guidebooks assume
that their audiences are not interested in bird evolutionary relationships,
then likely most of them won't be. On the other hand, if they took a page
or 2 to explain why the classification of orders and families has changed
(and may change again), I think most birders would find it interesting and
want to know more.

Paul Talbert
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
Seattle
tuisto at oz.net