Examination of Witnesses (Questions 127-139)
Professor David Cutler, Dr Sandra Knapp and Professor
Richard Bateman
25 MARCH 2008
Q127 Chairman: Thank you very much
indeed for your written evidence and for the time you are willing
to give us in person in some cases for the second time. We appreciate
that very much indeed. Can I remind you that we are on air and
that the proceedings may well be broadcast or webcast, so what
you say will be available to the wider world directly. May I also
invite you initially to state who you are so that this can be
recorded for the record and indicate what allegiance or affiliation
you have.
Professor Cutler: I am David Cutler. I am the
President of The Linnean Society.
Professor Bateman: Richard Bateman, President
of The Systematics Association.
Dr Knapp: I am Sandra Knapp and I am the Botanical
Secretary of The Linnean Society.
Q128 Chairman: Thank you very much
indeed. The evidence that we are receiving and certainly the comments
that we are receiving is about a continuing decline in taxonomy
in the UK. Can you tell the Committee whether this is reflected
in your own organisation, whether in the membership or the amount
of time or resource that is available to you?
Professor Cutler: Interestingly enough, last
year when we were celebrating a tercentenary of the birth of Linnaeus
interest in taxonomy was obviously revived in the Society and
we actually had 121 new members. I think this is indicative of
the interest that people can find in taxonomy. Over the past ten
years, because we do not only have taxonomists, and have a wide
range of people in the Society with a range of interests, our
membership numbers have remained more or less constant.
Q129 Chairman: We cannot arrange
an anniversary for you every year, of course! Are there any other
factors than that?
Professor Cutler: I think there are still taxonomists
who are not Fellows of the Society, but it may be that the Society
is now doing things that would be useful in coordinating the taxonomic
world.
Dr Knapp: One important thing about The Linnean
Society is that it is devoted to the study of natural history,
which is much larger than taxonomy. Taxonomy only forms a part
of what The Linnean Society does. We found that people were very
interested in meetings about taxonomy that have a taxonomic slant
and that has not changed over the years. So the interest is still
there. How many people are taxonomists is difficult.
Professor Bateman: I am sure you have already
had several different versions of the relationship between taxonomy
and systematics. You will note that we are The Systematics Association
and taxonomy is a subset of systematics concerned with the naming
and identification of organisms. I think it is important to state
at the outset that it is taxonomy that we are particularly concerned
about the decline of. The other aspects of systematics such as
phylogeny are in a much healthier condition. If we focus just
on the naming and identification of organisms, then only a portion
of our membership are involved in that side of systematics. We
are mainly a professional society, we bring in active professional
systematists and consequently we have a desirably low average
age and a considerable percentage of activism. That also means
that our membership numbers are smaller—they are round about
450, and like Linnean numbers, they have been relatively stable
for some time. What I would comment on is two trends. One is that
the ratio of British to non-British members has shifted substantially
in the last few years. The European contingent, the North American
contingent and the Australasian contingent in particular have
increased in number. The second trend is as I said a few minutes
ago that we are a very active society, but it is becoming more
difficult to persuade people to put substantial amounts of time
into promoting the objectives of the society. My impression is
that professional systematists, just like many other groups of
academics, are being asked to do more and more with less and less,
and they are finding it difficult to maintain commitments to independent
societies such as ourselves.
Q130 Chairman: The Committee has
looked at this topic not once but twice before, but after the
last report, chaired by Baroness Walmsley, we thought there was
some evidence of an increase in attention that the organisations
paid to their membership and also to looking out to the user community.
I wonder if there is anything specific any of you would like to
say on that?
Professor Cutler: I think the development of
the website for the Society has meant that we have much better
communication. We are able to inform people more readily of the
activities and interests and we also report the contents of our
meetings in an abbreviated form and this does attract people.
We are looking forward in our forward planning to have much more
involvement of our Fellows in the day-to-day activities of the
Society. So we certainly have paid attention to that aspect.
Q131 Chairman: To the user community
as well?
Professor Cutler: Yes, to the user community
too because by digitising many of the specimens and putting those
images on the web freely we are providing a wealth of information
to the user community in this way.
Dr Knapp: In direct response to the last report
The Linnean Society set up an annual systematics debate which
brings forward issues of contention in the field to which everyone
is invited and it involves voting and people having pros and cons.
It is hugely well attended every year. That was something that
was established in direct response to the last report.
Professor Bateman: I guess I would give a slightly
different slant on this. I would say that the main effect that
the last review had on The Systematics Association was to increase
its political interest and awareness. We have always done our
best to look after our user groups. The previous review helped
to identify gaps in coverage that we were already aware of. When
it became clear that the Government's response was effectively
a response of no action we did what we could within our available
resources to take action ourselves. For example, The Systematics
Association got together with The Linnean Society to create two
grant schemes—a small grants scheme and an intermediate
size grants scheme—for which we found independent funding.
These were designed to produce pump-priming data so that when
full systematics proposals were sent to the research councils
they would have greater credibility and a better chance of success
than previously.
Q132 Lord May of Oxford: Prompted
by the earlier Dainton inquiry I got interested in just how many
taxonomists there are in the UK and how they are distributed among
different categories of research. As some of you will be aware,
this led me to the conclusion that the taxonomy of taxonomists
is itself an understudied thing in that nobody could know. I wrote
that paper with Kevin Gaston. Since that time has there been—whilst
for ten years I have not really kept in touch—a more deliberate
effort to document just how many taxonomists and systematists
there are, both professional and amateur, or is it still in as
amorphous a state as it was 15 years ago?
Dr Knapp: In response to the Dainton inquiry
there was a UK Systematics Forum which set out to compile data
about how many systematists there were, but it was a largely voluntary
exercise. The only place where there has been very good data compiled
about the numbers of taxonomists is in Australia.
Q133 Lord May of Oxford: Of course!
Dr Knapp: I fell into that!
Chairman: We fall into it regularly!
Q134 Lord May of Oxford: It is Ebbie
Nielsen, right?
Dr Knapp: It is Ebbie Nielsen. I tried to get
a hold of those data to look at whether there had been a change
in the last decade. One of the interesting things that I discovered
in talking to people in Australia is that they tend to exclude
anyone who is not working in a nationally funded institution in
their data gathering exercise because there is no way of knowing
whether everyone has responded. So the error factor is huge even
in a place where this has been established long term.
Q135 Baroness Walmsley: As you will
know, we have had evidence from both Defra and the research councils
and neither of them will claim ownership of taxonomic research
as a discipline per se. They both describe themselves primarily
as user groups and, as Professor Lord May said earlier, it is
as if we were talking about a particle accelerator rather than
an area of pure research. Is it possible for taxonomy to survive
as a user-led science? Do you think there is a tension in NERC's
attitude given the fact that they do accept responsibility for
training and maintaining the expertise base in taxonomy as in
other areas?
Dr Knapp: I guess my answer to that would be
no, that no truly dynamic science can exist entirely led only
by its users because users do not lead developments in science,
they use developments in science. I also think users are very,
very important to the long-term survival of any science. One of
the things that is really important is to begin a conversation
between users and producers which both of those people own because
often, being a producer of information, people come and say, "We
want you to do this," but in fact what you need to have is
a conversation about what might be possible or what might be needed.
The conversation is perhaps because no one feels as though they
own it except the big taxonomic institutions like the Royal Botanical
Gardens Kew or Edinburgh or the Natural History Museum. Those
institutions do own taxonomy and do spend their money doing taxonomic
research, but until it is owned by both users and producers I
think the conversation will continue to eddy around.
Professor Cutler: We are not primarily a service
industry. There has to be continuity and a tremendous background
of collections and resources which have to be maintained. If people
dip in and out when they require the services, I could not visualise
a system which would support that sort of activity. I think we
need to look at proper succession training and obviously maintain
the wealth that we have in our collections and our libraries which
are part of the total picture for this. The taxonomic community
itself has to be responsible to quite a large extent for its activity
and its survival but also in conversation, as has been said.
Q136 Baroness Walmsley: It is a very
diffuse body of people, is it not?
Professor Cutler: Yes, it is.
Q137 Baroness Walmsley: Is it either
possible or desirable for any one organisation or government department
to take ownership and responsibility for taxonomic research?
Professor Cutler: I think it would be very difficult
to do. I think the Society itself could offer some facilities
for this. Obviously it is a question of people and resource. We
have a very broad spread spectrum of interest both in users and
in producers in this case. I think the Society could be helpful
in a situation like this.
Professor Bateman: I think it is worth looking
at the complexity of the situation. You have alluded to that already.
We tend to draw little diagrams where we are the producers and
out there are the consumers and the whole thing is subject to
market forces. There is some truth in that, but in this particular
case the range of users, as you have implied, is extremely great,
but a lot of them are using our information second, third and
fourth hand. It is a question of how far you trace that information.
The problem is that, with so many middlemen, the credit that goes
back to the original generators of the data gets smaller and smaller.
I have found it is very difficult to get either political credit
or financial credit for the actual generators of the data. It
is often the middlemen who benefit relatively substantially from
these kinds of systems. That is probably the biggest problem that
faces any enabling science—it is not just taxonomy. As you
will have seen, the Association is desirous of broadening out
this discussion to cover other long-term research programmes,
not least being climate change, but even there you often find
that the owners of large databases who are recycling old data
are the ones who are currently having the most impact, and a relatively
small amount of the total available funding is going into generating
genuinely new data. I think that is the primary challenge that
is facing taxonomy at the moment. It is possible to muddle through
and we already are muddling through mostly on old data and recycled
data. The trouble is that there is no obvious point where the
system will totally collapse—it will just become less and
less effective.
Dr Knapp: We often talk about the multiplicity
of users of taxonomy as being a negative point, but I actually
think that the multiplicity of users is a very positive point
about taxonomy and it is one of the reasons that there is this
resurgence of interest in the subject, it is because more and
more people are realising that it is important and necessary.
Rather than worry about having too many users, I think we ought
to be rather pleased that so many people want us and we should
just figure out how to talk to them a bit better.
Q138 Chairman: Has the character
of the range of users changed dramatically or is it pretty well
the same constituency but more of them?
Dr Knapp: As a practising taxonomist—and
I am still practising—I think the character of users has
changed enormously. I have contributed in a large way to the Encyclopaedia
of Life. The users of the Encyclopaedia of Life are enormously
wide and very big. One of the good things about these web-based
applications like the Encyclopaedia of Life is that they are designed
at their outset to connect into many different types of user groups.
The really interesting user groups are possibly the ones that
we have not found yet and those are the ones that are really interesting,
which means that one has to be relatively nimble on one's feet
to be able to identify that as an important place to look in the
future. With these new big initiatives like EoL they will be different.
When I started out the people who used taxonomy were other taxonomists.
Q139 Lord May of Oxford: Would it
be fair to say that as more problems are more clearly realised,
beginning with climate change, that defines more new user groups?
Dr Knapp: Absolutely. Taxonomy, like any science,
is an iterative process of discovery, so making one discovery
allows you to make another and establishes the baseline for yet
other things. It is this iterative process which means it is not
a one-off task. Doing the taxonomy of the Earth is not something
you do once and then put away in the cupboard; it is an iterative
process.
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