hmmm... passionate... "I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true. " Peter B. Medawar, Advice to a Young Scientist, 1979
Hmmmm....who said anything about hypotheses?
Hmmmm...not sure I agree. If it is so that Occurrence=Individual+Event, then a Specimen can be said to
*be* the
Individual, whereas images, DNA sequences, and the like are
the tokens. In other words, Individual "is a"
Specimen;
That might work for fish, but with *real* organisms, such as plants, a specimen is a fragment or representation of an individual and thus conceptually not really different to a chunk of DNA or a image.
I disagree. A fragment of a "real" organism is no different from a skin of a "fake" organism. Neither of these is a "representation" of an individual -- they are both *part* of an individual. An image is a representation of an individual. A DNA "sequence" is also a representation. I would argue that the product of PCR is also a representation. Actual DNA molecules within actual organism cells would be a "part" of the individual.
and an individual has a fragment, sacrificed to become a specimen. It is just that in fish the sacrifice was entire and ultimate... :)
Without getting into the notion of what constitutes an "entire" organism (e.g., when the water inside the cells is replaced by alcohol, was the displaced water part of the organism?), I would say that both fish and plants are but mere footnotes on the biodiversity ladnscape, compared with insects (usually preserved as mostly intact whole organisms). And, of course, the insects are mere footnotes compared to the bacteria....but I digress.
The notion of the 'individual' is probably a furphy... for the different organmisms the token might be an individual, but it might be a fragment, or a part of a population, or perfhaps even the entire population.
My brain is starting to hurt again.
hmmm... thinking... repressed memories (misidentified and forgotten specimens, or, extinctions you refuse to accept)... false memories (occurrences you made up because you're the expert and the species should bloody well be there)... hallucinations (anybody else's taxonony, identifications and survey results)...
Indeed. And I'm sure all such flavors of memories are represented in databases within our community.
At this point I want to fork to a cosmic metaphycical ramble about occurrence being a totally scale dependent many to many to many relationship between stuff (possibly represented by things), time and place... but I won't... ;)
My brian hurts a bit less now. Thanks.
This conversation could go very weird, very quickly
What is this 'could' of which you speak?
:-)
Evidently, you have very little experience in the realm of the "very" weird. Trust me, we haven't even come close yet. We've only just nudged our toes across the "weird" line.
Definitely time for some sleep.
Rich