Taxonomy : renaissance or Tower of Babel ?
نویسندگان
چکیده
Taxonomy, the science of naming and classifying organisms, is the original bioinformatics and a fundamental basis for all biology. Yet over the past few decades, teaching and funding of taxonomy has declined. Last year, taxonomy suddenly became fashionable again, and revolutionary approaches to taxonomy using DNA and Internet technology are now being contemplated. For examples, see the article by Tautz et al. in this issue of TREE, and a separate paper by Hebert et al. in Proc. R. Soc. Lond. Ser B. The new excitement about taxonomy is driven partly by advances in technology, and partly by newly perceived needs given the biodiversity crisis. To reform and build on what taxonomists have already accomplished, the biology community must now begin to seek consensus, and avoid fragmenting into vociferous subdisciplines with multiple, competing aims.
منابع مشابه
Are We Moving Toward an Information SuperHighway or a Tower of Babel? The Challenge of Large-Scale Semantic Heterogeneity
متن کامل
Tower of Babel: Facilitating Multi-cultural Educational Activities and Group Work with 3d Collaborative Virtual Environments
The project described in this paper focuses on the use of distributed virtual media-rich environments in an educational multi-cultural context. It revolves around the construction of a virtual Tower of Babel in a 3D Collaborative Virtual Environment (3D CVE), involving students across cooperating institutions from Finland and Taiwan, on two different continents in different time zones. This pro...
متن کامل" I Advance on the Question Slowly, Just as Larry Does. I Am an Intelligent Officer. Nothing Exists without a Context. " (le Carré Our Game, P. 113)
Tower of Babel In Genesis the people begin to build a tower on the plains of Shinar in order to ‘make a name for ourselves, so that we may not be scattered about the whole earth’ (11:4). For their pride, they are punished with exactly the fate that they feared: ‘It was named Babel therefore, because there Yahweh confused the language of the whole earth. It was from there that Yahweh scattered t...
متن کاملFrom Classical Metaphysics to Medical Informatics
An item in the Wall Street Journal of 13.11.2001 describes how computers might be used as a means of alerting health officials to problems caused by bioterror-ism. The author notes that biological attacks will likely be marked by statistical spikes in the purchase of over-the-counter remedies for specific common ailments , and the data pertaining to such purchases can be made available immediat...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
عنوان ژورنال:
دوره شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2003