I totally agree! An individual is NOT a taxon. It just belongs to one
I would refine that to "It just is asserted to belong to one..."
so we need to focus our attention on individual-at-event type of assertions.
I would classify individual-at-event instances as "instances", rather than assertions. I think they represent what most of us would treat as "facts". "Assertions" are more like opinions -- like "what taxon concept this individual falls within".
That individual is linked to a TaxonName which represents a TaxonConcept. Why do we need to talk about species at all? All we have to deal with is individuals, taxon names, and taxon concepts.
I think of "species" as the most popular kind of "taxon concept". Not like strict Linnean rank sort-of species.
I also agreed that an individual doesn't have to be whole, so in my opinion "parts" can also be considered 'the individual in
question'.
That is my old thinking. My new thinking is that you abstract up to an whole organism when you have a part (e.g., tissue sample), when representing an Occurrence; just as you would abstract down to "Indidividual", when you what to represent Taxon-at-Event for an Occurrence.
Similarly, I also agree that up to populations we can still talk about
individuals.
However, it is important to be able to link "parts" to the whole
individuals
if needed, e.g. is_part_of.
Agreed! The link needs to be there. We just need to figure out which links are within-class (e.g., parent-child), and which are across classes.
In haste, but still with Aloha,
Rich