SPECIAL ISSUE 34a.pdf - Biology International

Biology International Special Issue No. 34 (1997)
During 1996 the current draft was published in Taxon (45:.349-372) and the
Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature (53: 148-166), and was made available
on the World Wide Web (http://www.rom.on.ca/ebuff/ biocode.htm); it was
also distributed to participants at the International Congress of Systematic and
Evolutionary Biology in Budapest, and those attending nomenclatural comm-
ittee meetings at the IUMS Congress in Jerusalem. The draft is a tentative
working document and needs not only fixther revision and development but a
glossary, appendices and illustrative examples. It is nevertheless the product
of many hours of what has been, for the participants, a process of mutual edu-
cation (see Chapter 2).
One of the aims of the BioCode project is the harmonization of terminology
across the whole field of taxonomic nomenclature, and during the discussions
the first lesson learned was that while the existing Codes share most principles
in common the terms used are (even in the English language alone) very
different. In some cases the words employed are not self-explanatory, and
they may be deceptive (for instance many "available" zoological narnes are
not available for use). Even the word "name" itself is not equivalent in the
present Codes: while in the zoological Code it is used only in the normal
sense, in the Botanical one it also has the meaning [as in the expression "type
of a name"] of the zoologists' nominal taxon, i.e. a taxonomic concept denoted
by a name. The attached Table is reproduced from the draft BioCode and
shows suggested ways in which some of these ambiguities may be overcome.
In an enviable example of decisive action the proposed terminology has been
incorporated in the 1996 edition of the International Code of Nomenclature
for Cultivated Plants (see Ch. ??).
The layout of the draft BioCode conforms more to the botanical Code than to
the zoological one, because an electronic copy of the former served as a
template during the discussions, but many of the provisions are of
"zoological" origin. Perhaps the most noteworthy example (at least for
botanists) is the adoption of the so-called principle of coordination. This
concerns three "groups" of nominal taxa (the family-, genus- and species-
groups); a name established in one of these for a taxon at a particular rank is
deemed to have been established also at al1 other ranks in that group. Thus a
name applied to a genus is automatically established also at subgeneric rank,
and vice versa (Art. 29), and a name for a subfamily is simultaneously
established (with appropriate change in ending) for a family and for any other
ranks (e.g. tribe) in the family-group (Art. 27). The same situation applies to
specific and subspecific epithets (Art. 31). The principle results in a taxon
keeping the same name regardless of the ranks accorded in the opinions of
different workers, and its absence from the Botanical Code is one of the main
differences between that Code and the Zoological one.
Another major difference between those Codes is the treatment of species-
group epithets when, as a result of taxonomic opinion, two taxa whose names
include the same epithet are placed in the same genus (see also Chapter 2).
Clearly one or other epithet has to be replaced to avoid homonymy. In zoolog-
ical practice the precedence of epithets is determined by their dates of original