But eventually, we all came together to resolve the dispute amicably. In a paper published this month, we proposed a new set of principles to guide what one day, we hope, will be a single authoritative list of the world’s species. This would help manage and conserve them for future generations.
In the process, we’ve shown how a scientific stoush can be overcome when those involved try to find common ground.
Scientists worked out a few differences over how to name species.
How it all began
In May 2017 two of the authors, Stephen Garnett and Les Christidis, published an article in Nature. They argued taxonomy needed rules around what should be called a species, because currently there are none. They wrote:
for a discipline aiming to impose order on the natural world, taxonomy (the classification of
