The Caveman’s Corner

We have a rant today.

I’ve been doing the research for my next “meet an ancestor” today, and I keep coming across one word, “Cebidae.” Apparently, the ecology of our ancestor’s genus was similar to that of the Cebidae. Well, that’s quite interesting, or at least it would be if I knew at all what the authors meant by Cebidae.

The debate we’re getting into here is over the macrotaxonomy of the New World Monkeys. Some authorities like to split it up into lots of little families, as many as seven, while some prefer to refer it in its entirety to one family, incidentally the Cebidae.

Thus, Walker’s Primates of the World, Stein and Rowe’s Physical Anthropology 8th ed., and the Pictorial Guide to the Living Primates give the Cebidae as 11 genera ranging from squirrel monkeys to spider monkeys; everything but marmosets and tarmarins. The Encyclopedia of Human Evolution prefers to exclude only the spider monkeys from the Cebidae and include the marmosets. Animal Diversity Web lumps in all the New World Monkeys. And finally, Wikipedia authoritatively states that the Cebidae is “one of the four families of New World monkeys now recognised,” and is a combination of marmosets, squirrel monkeys, and capuchins (the actual genus Cebus).

Cebus, about the only member of the Cebidae everyone agrees on

Obviously, this is chaos, and it does absolutely nothing to serve the interests of science. Nor is it the only example of such taxonomic pissyfighting in the annals of biology. We’ve gotten to this point because the of the egos of the “authorities.” Anyone who writes a major text uses a different taxonomy because they can and they know someone will follow them. The only way to fix it is for researchers to swallow hard, take a stiff shot of brandy, and start using a standard nomenclature. That was the point of Linnean taxonomy in the first place, wasn’t it?

The individual standard doesn’t matter that much. No matter what your personal opinion about the affinities of Callimico, there really isn’t so much known about New World Monkey relationships that any reasonable arrangement of the major subfamilies can be said to be absolutely wrong. Groves’ Primate Taxonomy in particular has gained a lot of traction in recent years, and I for one will be going with him in this blog (which is obviously among the most influential publications in the the field :P).

So, in summary, sometimes you just have to suck it up and subordinate your ego to the cause of effective communication, be you a primatologist, microbiologist, jellyfish researcher, or even out in the real world.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 12:59 pm and is filed under Primatology, Science Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.