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Systematics and Taxonomy (S&TC Reports)

I join with others in thanking all the committee members—particularly the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, for choosing the topic and providing excellent leadership—our outstanding secretariat and our adviser, Professor Geoff Boxshall, FRS. I mention FRS because, as will emerge in my remarks, one of the problems we have encountered is a feeling that much of descriptive taxonomy is not a sexy subject. On the other hand, it is worth emphasising that the Royal Society, which is often thought of as a rather stuffy institution, has elected in recent years quite a few taxonomists and systematists, not all molecular people but many classical people who would be at home in a 19th-century institution. We need to recognise that. I begin with a digression that will circle back to relevance. On a personal note, I find one of the extraordinarily interesting features of the House of Lords Select Committees—no other country’s upper house can say this—is the way we can put together, partly but by no means exclusively through the Cross Benches, individuals with the highest levels of expertise, authority and standing in the subject under study. At its best, this leads to a harmonious engagement between civil servants and Ministers, who can take advantage of constructive reviews to reinforce strengths and to address weaknesses. It is like the visiting committees that well run universities bring in every couple of years to take a critical view of departments. At its best, I have had the pleasure and privilege of being involved in some things; on the other hand, at its worst, you tend to get a clash between independent expert opinion—which, admittedly, can sometimes shade into independent expert opinionatedness, but which is always eager to help—and self-satisfied bureaucratic rigidities which are resentfully dismissive of any call for change. The saga that has already been sketched a couple of times about the taxonomy and systematics Select Committee 1 in 1992, Select Committee 2 in 2002 and Select Committee 3 in 2008 has interesting examples of the best and the worst. That brings me to the wonder and hope that the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, will still be around for taxonomy and systematics Select Committee 4 in four years’ time. Amusingly, my noble friend Lord Krebs and I appeared together as a duo on the 1992 committee. Lord Dainton’s inquiry had good outcomes, partly, but by no means wholly, because my noble friend Lord Krebs shortly afterwards took over as the chief executive of the Natural Environmental Research Council. The 2002 inquiry of the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, also revisited many of the things that had been promised but had not been done and had another go at things that had not been accepted. There has again been some progress. From what we have heard and what has been described—I shall not revisit this in any detail—there have been some good things and some bad things, and I shall speak to two particular bad things. However, before I do so, let me reinforce some of the good things, but in a shaded way for one of them. The NERC is to commission a study of the state of taxonomy, including the number of taxonomists, trends, job openings and so on. This goes back to 1992, when it was called for but not done. This prompted me at the time to get together with Kevin Gaston in the Natural History Museum to produce a paper in Nature on the taxonomy of taxonomists. Part of the fault is that the taxonomy community is not as introspective as it could perhaps productively be and, shamelessly to digress, it is a community where roughly one-third of it works on vertebrates, particularly birds and mammals; roughly one-third of it works on plants of all kinds; and roughly one third of it works on invertebrates, the small things that arguably run the world. In fact, if you use the number of species, both known and probably there but not yet known, in relation to the workforce, the workforce is out of whack with its proper job description by a factor of 10 vertebrates to plants and a factor of 100 invertebrates to vertebrates. I digress, but that is a very welcome study. The conjunction between the Natural Environmental Research Council and the Natural History Museum to convene a dialogue on priorities for the UK systematics community is praiseworthy, as is Defra’s recognition of its proper obligation to bring the fungal collection from CABI into Kew. The commitment by NERC and SERC to web-based taxonomy has been welcomed, but, even here is a foreshadowing of the negative points on which I shall now dwell, because absent in those plans is a commitment to the associated taxonomy qua taxonomy; as, for example, simply in online identification tools. The first of the two hobbyhorses that I wish to ride, I shall ride briefly, and it pertains to the Department for International Development. Our committee recommended in its report, ""digitisation projects that focus on the biodiversity conservation and sustainability needs of developing countries"." This was sent to DfID’s address. The recommendation is a paraphrase of DfID’s stated priorities; that is, the sustainability needs of developing countries. In a tour de force of cognitive dissonance, DfID’s response was to reject that recommendation on the ground that it did not match its priorities. I would ask the luckless Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Drayson, whose fault it is not, whether that is one of the things that he would undertake to address in connection with DfID. The response was a little puzzling, although—I shamelessly and probably improperly digress again—I half suspect that it might be a hangover from agitated interaction between DfID and the Royal Society five years ago, when I was its president and Clare Short was the Secretary of State, over the department’s plans essentially to dismantle long-standing research collaboration with developing countries in Africa, partly on the ridiculous grounds that such tertiary education projects in countries that were in crying need of primary education were elitist and therefore taboo. That disappeared with Clare Short’s tenancy of that office, and Hilary Benn quickly righted it, but I suspect that in some dark corner of DfID is the person who rejected that recommendation. There are two more serious, overarching themes. One of them has been referred to already, although it will not prevent me revisiting it; namely, the lack of a lead department to co-ordinate addressing issues which involve in various combinations, at the very least, six government departments: DIUS, DfID, Defra, DCMS, which funds the research in the Natural History Museum, the FCO, which is responsible for overseas territories—I could speak also about those, but I shall let them go—and Research Councils UK, which, when I had tenancy of the Office of Science and Technology, was effectively a ring-fenced entity, separate from the DTI. The second of my concerns is the seeming lack of awareness of the nature of the subject of taxonomy and systematics, much less of its current health, within Research Councils UK more generally. Our worry about that is expressed quite trenchantly in the report. Particular emphasis was laid on the Natural Environment Research Council, whose approach we found "confused", but there is a more general failure of co-ordination in Research Councils UK. I return to the theme with which Professor Sutherland began by quoting from an article written by Dr Sandy Knapp in the magazine of the Linnean Society of London, in which she pointed out that the scientific world was different in the day of Charles Darwin. In those days, it was natural history. Observation and description were very much a part of mainstream science, whereas today there is often a feeling that biology means work in laboratories and testing hypotheses. We encountered that in an explicit quote from the Natural Environment Research Council, which said in response to our worries: ""Research proposals including classical taxonomic approaches may have the best chance of success if they take account of … the hypothesis testing science that typifies responsive mode grants"." In more detail, NERC spends only about a quarter of its money on responsive mode, responding to the best proposal—blue skies; about a quarter on proposals directed in particular areas, not one of which encompasses taxonomy and systematics; and half on national capabilities, which are mainly its own institutions. That is a bit of a change from when John Cadogan was head of the Office of Science and Technology. Our aim then was that half the money should go on responsive mode. That means asking the best people to say what the best proposals are. The notion that they have to be judged against some simple-minded notion of how you do science by testing hypotheses is just plain batty. It is ignorant and it is stupid. I have lived four decades of lucky life in a variety of areas, and there is no recipe for doing science. Certainly an important ingredient is just doing descriptive things. In conclusion, I seriously hope that the rejection of the idea of a lead department responsible for co-ordinating the various needs that we will hear more about will be yet one more time revisited and that abrupt rejection overturned.