Paleonet: Homo sapiens

[Jere H. Lipps]

At 07:54 PM 2/14/2008, you wrote:
>"Jere H. Lipps" <jlipps at berkeley.edu> wrote :
>
> > Bakker
> > made an effort to designate E. D. Cope as a type, but this may have
> > been more for publicity than a serious attempt.
> >
>        Shocked! I tell you, I'm shocked that you should even hint that
>the sainted Bob-ness might ever court publicity over serious taxonomic
>issues.

I could hardly believe it myself, but it was really the inference of 
Spamer (a good name for the discussion of this issue, I'd think).

> >
>        If my memory serves me correctly, both Craig Venter and his
>competitor in self-effacement James Watson, have chucked their genomes
>into the human genotype sequencing hat. Which for the molecular people
>effectively means that they are well on the way to becoming (joint,
>molecular) type specimens.

Fortunately, I believe that their genomes will merely go into GenBank 
and be another comparative point in the human genome scale rather 
than a type specimen.  While they may think they are great (and maybe 
their genomes will substantiate that in some weird way), I really 
think they may be doing this to demonstrate that it is a good idea, 
given some of the comments of critics that this is an invasion of 
privacy, which I can understand.   To make it all understandable we'd 
need Eistein's, Clinton's (both), King's, etc, as well as a million 
more obscure and relatively lowly regarded people's genomes.  By 
themselves, I'm not sure they are interesting.

These sorts records are probably more what we should have in 
morphology, if it were possible, then we could characterize a species 
more accurately than we do with selection of the "typical" (HA!) 
holotypic example.   Sort of a MorphBank where all morphotypes are 
available to all for analyses.

>        Looking at the idea from a different tack, in the late '80s or
>early '90s there was an early effort to demonstrate the efficacy of CAT
>scanning by both digitally and mechanically slicing up a particular
>cadaver. (I can't remember if the digital tomography was by Xray or
>MRI)

The vert people do this with their fossils and a few invert and micro 
guys have done similar things too.   Might be a step towards MorphBank.

>
>        That project opens up (and illuminates as well) whole big cans
>of annelids for what is meant by a holotype.

Indeed!

Jere