Understanding Taxonomic Disorder
We investigate how values influence species classifications, how this affects the different uses to which these classifications are put, and how any problems caused by this value-ladenness may be resolved. This interdisciplinary project, involving biologists and philosophers, is funded by the Flemish Research Council.
Recent news
Leuven workshop on ‘Taxonomic Disorder’
The name Orestias elegans refers to both a species of pupfish and orchids. Such ‘hemihomonymy’ (when a plant and an animal share a Linnaean name) poses obvious problems when storing data connected to these groups and making it available for users searching for data by species name. This way, it poses a challenge to bioinformaticians…
New paper: Why resolving taxonomic disorder is important
A new paper is out in the special issue on taxonomic disorder & list governance in Organisms, Diversity and Evolution. This one illustrates the consequences of taxonomic disorder with examples from a range of different taxa, and shows how list governance could have avoided these consequences. Here’s the abstract, the paper should be free to…
Project weekend in Oignies-en-Thiérache
Between september 12 and 14, we’ve planned a 3-day joint meeting of the FWO project and Charles Pence’s FNRS project. The meeting will take place in Oignies-en-Thiérache, a quiet village in the middle of the Viroin-Hermeton natural park that is home to a range of rare species. It’ll be the perfect location to make rapid…
Note: All photos of non-human animals on this website have been made by biologist / philosopher / photographer / friend of the project Frank Zachos. All photos of non-human plants have been made by Vincent Cuypers.
Taxonomic Disorder 