Supplementary memorandum by the Systematics
Association
OPENING STATEMENT
The Systematics Association welcomes the ongoing
interest of the House of Lords in the UK's systematic biology
community, and acknowledges the patience shown by the Lords in
their willingness to continue to monitor what might conceivably
be regarded as a minority discipline, of tangential importance
to the UK's science base. Obviously, this is not the view of the
Association. However, we do believe that taxonomy is currently
operating at the sharp end of a broader malaise that is slowly
but steadily eroding the cohesion of the UK's science base—specifically,
the piecemeal dismantling of the infrastructures surrounding a
wide range of enabling, baseline sciences that are best represented
by taxonomy in the present round of parliamentary reviews.
In our opinion, the most critical challenge
that we are facing is the broader question of how the UK maintains—or
perhaps fails to maintain—sufficient fundamental research
in disciplines that require continuous, long-term activity but
that feed only indirectly into the needs of society—and
so contribute only indirectly to explicit policy-related targets
and government commitments. The way the UK's science is currently
funded strongly emphasises short-term research projects addressing
more focused, and so more tractable, problems. Also, the government's
long-standing predilection for setting a few simple performance
targets to encourage development of particular areas of research
inevitably forces research leaders to prioritise immediacy of
impact above the maintenance of permanent infrastructures—in
this case, of both taxonomic researchers and the collections that
provide much of the basis of their work.
This trend of instant gratification has been
epitomised by the Research Assessment Exercise, which has dictated
research planning in the universities and has strongly influenced
policy in all other public sector institutions. The RAE in effect
boils down to just two linked criteria—bringing into the
host institution the maximum amount of overhead funds, and publishing
a small number of scientific papers of high immediate impact—an
approach that is, in truth, highly inefficient, and certainly
one that seriously disadvantages taxonomy, which has at best a
modest initial impact but retains its full relevance thereafter.
At this point, I would like to make a personal
confession—in my past roles as Director of Science at the
Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and as Head of the Botany Department
at the Natural History Museum, I have knowingly and deliberately
contributed to the decline of the taxonomic research conducted
under my proctorship. I have done this by encouraging staff to
evolve their research programmes to better fit the RAE-inspired
criteria by which they, and their institutions, are currently
measured. In making this decision, I have been in accord with
the policies promoted by the senior managements and Boards of
Trustees of these institutions. Moreover, I remain unrepentant—in
the current environment, taxonomy simply does not bring adequate
benefits to either the individuals or institutions that pursue
it. Thus, to maintain a strong taxonomic base in such an environment
is an act of altruism that can only accurately be described as
reckless.
Suggestions for making taxonomic data more widely
available are similarly altruistic, since one of the main features
of taxonomic data is the willingness with which we share those
data for free. Placing such data on the Web is simply the latest
manifestation of a long and honourable tradition of freely distributed
biodiversity information, borne out of Victorian philanthropy,
and encouraged by the continued substantial contribution of amateur
organisations to the surveying and monitoring of organisms.
The truth of the matter is that the taxonomic
community has become increasingly influenced by market forces,
and the market price for taxonomic data has historically been
next to nothing. Ironically, this collective generosity now decreases
the influence of taxonomists in the wider world. Yet it remains
a highly desirable feature of our community, because the data
are valuable to an exceptionally wide range of users—but
often indirectly, through complex chains of intermediaries. This
mode of usage reduces the value that anyone user places on taxonomic
data, and makes it all but impossible for the originator to recoup
the costs of generating that data, even though those costs are
remarkably modest. It is equally difficult to persuade funders
or users to view preserved or living natural history collections
as being analogous, to the concentrations of DNA sequencing technology
that permitted successful completion of the Human Genome project.
In short, the Association believes that taxonomy is too far removed
from "the market" to allow its future to be dictated
wholly by market forces. The negative consequences of doing so
have become painfully evident, and lie at the root of the present
review.
The declines in long-term infrastructures such
as taxonomy are occurring slowly, so that their consequences are
not immediately obvious. However, we note that reversing the decline
in taxonomy will of necessity, also be a slow and tortuous process
(the oft-used popular super-tanker analogy is particularly apposite
here). The Association concludes that Britain needs to develop
a simpler and more responsive science infrastructure—one
that is expressly designed to operate over much longer time scales.
The shorter term, more overtly charismatic research programmes
that are the current focus of British science could then be firmly
fixed onto that robust framework, thereby improving both cohesion
and communication in our science base and better placing UK researchers
to address major interdisciplinary challenges, not least climate
change. The association believes that the broader topic of Britain's
long-term research base should be regarded as a high priority
for future parliamentary review.
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