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Zoological Nomenclature (thesaurus)

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Concept information

Preferred term

homogeneity  

Definition

  • One of the qualities that a nomenclatural system should have: there should be some equivalence, by some criteria, between various taxa ascribed to the same rank within the taxonomic hierarchy. Although discussed by various authors already, this difficult problem has not yet been satisfactorily solved by the international community of taxonomists. This means that taxa ascribed to a given rank in different clades may not be equivalent in various biological terms (numbers of subordinate taxa; morphological, genetic or ecological diversity; speciation and extinction rates; genetic and evolutionary patterns, etc). Consequently, comparisons that are sometimes made among lists or numbers of taxa in various works dealing with evolution, stratigraphy, biogeography or ecology, may be irrelevant and spurious, and must be considered very cautiously. This is not at all a good reason, however, to reject the hierarchical structure of the taxonomic system. Even if it could (and possibly will) be improved by making ranks more significant in biological terms, this structure already allows taxonomy to play the practical role of an indexation system of information, just like the hierarchical structure of keywords in an index or a database. In such systems, keywords at a given level are only roughly equivalent (in terms of information content or diversity, or of number of subordinate keywords) but are nevertheless quite useful to track down the information. A taxonomy without ranks would be most inconvenient in use and poorly informative. (Dubois 2005c)

Scope note

  • Code: No term

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Identifier

  • 1442

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URI

http://data.loterre.fr/ark:/67375/FM8-HPF8CXXL-1

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