I said that taxonomy was one of the most rancorously ill-tempered of biological fields. Stephen Gould has well characterized it with the phrase ‘names and nastiness’. Taxonomists seem to feel passionately about their schools of thought, in a way that we expect in political science or economics, but not usually in academic science. It is clear that members of a particular school of taxonomy think of themselves as a beleaguered band of brothers, like the early Christians. I first realized this when a taxonomist acquaintance told me, white-faced with dismay, the ‘news’ that So-and-so (the name
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