Magallana or mayhem?

ABSTRACT

Given the competitive side of human nature, it is inevitable that some people will wish to suppress the openly available (i.e. published) hypotheses of others in favour of their own. This opinion piece uses three molluscan examples at the level of genus – involving oysters (Magallana: Ostreidae), land snails (Powelliphanta: Rhytididae) and nudibranchs (Trinchesia: Trinchesiidae) – wherein workers suffering from ‘revision shock’ have used non-taxonomic courses of action to express their dissidence by attempting to suppress the taxonomy of others (i.e. by recommending avoidance, personal attacks, or omission, respectively). Although ‘revision shock’ is understandable following change at any taxonomic level and universal consensus within the research community is not always achievable, none of these courses for suppression is beneficial to scientific knowledge or endeavour in the long term. Such dissidence should be contained within the bounds of evidence-based published science; certainly not posted on social media sites. In the interests of objectivity and ethics, everyone should adopt the latest justified and openly published taxonomic hypothesis, even though they do not necessarily agree with it, and expect further changes with future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Nomenclature
• published science
• taxonomic stability
• revision shock
• dissidence

Acknowledgements

The author has discussed the topic of nomenclatural stability versus changing taxonomy with numerous (‘professional’ and ‘amateur’) scientific colleagues over 45 years. He gratefully acknowledges the comments of the following colleagues on earlier drafts of this Opinion Piece: Stephen Garnett, Carmel McDougall, Paolo Mariottini, Sasha Martynov, Daniele Salvi, Hamish Spencer, Barry Russell and Kevin Thiele.

Disclosure statement

The work by Parkinson (1979) is, according to the title page, copyright to the author. The term copyright is here interpreted as prevention of reproduction without attribution rather than prevention of reproduction (with due attribution) of small parts for the purposes of research and review, as is done in this Opinion Piece.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.