On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 9:43 AM, Richard Pyle deepreef@bishopmuseum.org wrote:
... Part of the problem is that a lot of this stuff is driven by passionate individuals, who also happen to be highly over-committed.
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...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. It could be thought of as a token of stuff that was in a particular place at a particular time. Think I am with Steve on this one... if only to provoke a conceept fight... :)
but Individual "has a" image.
and an individual has a fragment, sacrificed to become a specimen. It is just that in fish the sacrifice was entire and ultimate... :)
Now that I think about it, perhaps but if the elusive "Individual" is key to this relationship, then perhaps Specimens serve as bot "evidence" of an occurrence, and the "stuff" of the Individual represneted by the Occurrence.
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.
The distinction between 'the stuff' and the specimen is only one of definition, isn't it? If a museum or herbarium agrees to accept and curate it, then 'stuff' becomes a specimen.
omg! ... curation is the point at which 'stuff' becomes 'things'! (yes, remember this, you heard it on TDWG first) ...
My brain hurts.
Hey, you only write this stream of subconsiousness... we have to read it... :)
Although I don't deny the existence of memory patterns in neurons that are associated with a HumanObservation, there isn't any way that we can receive a representation of that memory directly.
oh oh... metaconcept/metaphysics alert...
That is, there is a species identification, number of individuals, etc., associated with an observation that is based on the memory of the person who made the observation, and that memory is represented by a database record with associated metadata.
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)...
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... ;)
This conversation could go very weird, very quickly
What is this 'could' of which you speak?
jim :)