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Systematics and Taxonomy (S&TC Reports)

I, too, thank my noble friend Lord Sutherland of Houndwood for his excellent chairmanship of the committee and for introducing the debate. I also extend my thanks to the committee secretariat and our special adviser, Professor Boxshall. As has been mentioned, I have been involved with the story of the Select Committee’s interest in taxonomy since the Dainton report, although I do not quite have the pedigree of the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, who has served on all three Select Committees. Following the 1992 Dainton report, I prepared a separate report for the Natural Environment Research Council on taxonomy. I then became the chief executive of NERC and had the pleasure of implementing my own recommendations, which included the introduction of a taxonomy training initiative. I should also mention an interest as chairman of the Natural History Museum in Oxford. I re-read my 1992 report just before the debate and the questions that we are raising now have a depressing ring of familiarity about them. It is almost as though there has been a dialogue of the deaf between the Select Committee and the taxonomy community on the one hand, and the Government on the other. I hope that the Government’s ears are open and listening today. In my contribution I will refer to three topics, some of which have been covered but bear repeating. First, I will make a brief comment on why taxonomy matters; secondly, I will refer to the current lack of strategic vision in the UK; and, thirdly, I will speak about the role of regional museums. In his novel The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann wrote: ""You ask what is the use of classification, arrangement, systematization. I answer you: order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject—the actual enemy is the unknown"." Taxonomy is the science of bringing order and simplification to the bewildering diversity of the natural world. Indeed, Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist and father of taxonomy, liked to say: ""Deus creavit, Linnaeus disposuit"," which translates as, ""God created, Linnaeus organized"." Linnaeus based his classification on observable anatomical characteristics of plants and animals. While many present day taxonomists still rely on such features, molecular taxonomy, which relies on gene sequences, has, to a substantial degree, eclipsed the more traditional methods of determining the relationships among living organisms. Increasingly in the future, taxonomy will be based on gene sequences and be internet-based. This reality should be recognised in any future strategy for this country. As we heard in the introductory speech of the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, classification reflects the evolutionary tree of life. This was famously enunciated in the debate in Oxford on 30 June 1860 between Bishop Wilberforce and Thomas Henry Huxley when the Bishop—described on another occasion by Disraeli as "unctuous, oleaginous and saponaceous"—asked Huxley whether he was descended from a monkey on his grandmother’s or his grandfather’s side. In the oft-quoted reply, Huxley said that he was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth. One member of the audience, a certain Lady Brewster, is said to have fainted. Thanks to modern molecular taxonomy, things have moved on. Lady Brewster would surely have fainted all over again had she read the Sun headline on 20 June 2007, "Grandad was an anchovy". It is pretty unusual for the Sun to carry major stories about taxonomy, but this one was a blockbuster. Gene sequences have shown that an eldritch and unprepossessing fish-like sand-dwelling marine animal called amphioxus is close to the 550 million year-old common ancestor of all vertebrates, including you and me. It has many blocks of genes in common with humans, a phenomenon known as synteny. As we have heard, taxonomy is not only intellectually exciting, it has many practical applications. Let me provide just one instance. We know from taxonomic and phylogenetic studies based on gene sequences that the virus that causes AIDS, HIV, has been transmitted to man more than once from chimpanzees and sooty mangabeys, and first became established in humans in Kinshasa in the middle of the last century. Taxonomy of the AIDS virus today provides essential information for public health issues such as the spread of drug-resistant mutations and the introduction of new strains by immigration. Taxonomy of the AIDS virus also proved the innocence of Bulgarian nurses who were under a death sentence in Libya for allegedly transmitting the virus in a children’s hospital. If taxonomy is so interesting and so important, what is the problem that has led the Select Committee to hold three inquiries in the past 17 years? The problem with taxonomy, in my view, is that it is an underpinning science for a whole host of other branches of biology. Indeed, no experimental or observational scientific paper in biology can be published without reference to taxonomy, since the author must refer to the species that he or she has studied. The fact that taxonomy is underpinning means that too many of the funders of research take it for granted or believe that it has all been done. However, as we have heard, taxonomy is by no means a completed task but a rapidly changing branch of biology. In my research career, the group of species that I have spent many decades of my life studying, the Paridae or titmice, are now designated as belonging to different genera, whereas 30 years ago when I started out on my research they all belonged to one genus. I repeat, taxonomy is part of the infrastructure that enables biologists, whatever their field of interest, to carry out and report their work. However, while in areas such as space science, particle physics, oceanography and molecular biology the research councils and the Government accept the need to invest substantial sums in underpinning infrastructure, this is, sadly, not true of taxonomy. There simply has been and is no strategic programme of investment in research or training in taxonomy. Nor did we detect in our inquiry any associated strategic direction for the subject, although we hope that as a result of our recommendations that strategic direction should appear. All the funders of taxonomy from whom we took evidence said that they were users of taxonomy, not funders of the underpinning scientific knowledge. We are all users of the roads and the trains, but someone has to take responsibility for building and maintaining them. The same is true of taxonomy. As we have heard, the situation is exacerbated by the lack of leadership among government departments. Although we heard claims of co-ordination, a more honest and accurate claim would be one of confusion. I hope that in his response the Minister will assure us that if we come back to this in five years the situation will have changed, there will be a strategic vision for the future of taxonomy and there will be a lead government department. I turn now to the national and regional taxonomic collections. The major centres in the UK for taxonomic work are the natural history museums and botanical gardens. As we have heard, for historical reasons the UK has some of the world’s most important, indeed astounding, taxonomic collections, which serve as reference material for researchers all over the world and as places for taxonomic research and education. They also have—this has not yet been mentioned and I shall elaborate on it in a moment—a major role in public outreach. I shall give noble Lords some figures. The Natural History Museum in London houses an estimated 70 million specimens, the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew well over 6 million, and the national museums and gardens of the devolved countries collectively also well over 6 million specimens. However, the English regional collections are also of great importance. The second largest collection in England is in Oxford, with more than 6 million specimens in the Natural History Museum and the Fielding-Druce Herbarium, and Cambridge and Manchester also have very large and important collections. How are these institutions in England funded? Kew and the Natural History Museum in London, as we have already heard, receive grants-in-aid from Defra and DCMS, but the regional museums do not. Our recommendation 3.29 was that the Government provide continuity of funding for regional museums but the response from DCMS, in my view, was disappointingly vague. I hope that the Minister will confirm to us that DCMS will indeed provide a guaranteed continuity of funding for the regional museums in England and for the important work that they do. I return, finally, to the role of museums and collections in education. Our recommendation 3.28 referred to the disappearance of taxonomy and biodiversity from the school curriculum. In their positive reply, the Government recognised this issue and, among other things, referred to the role of the Natural History Museum in London in providing high quality out-of-classroom learning. I emphasise that, in addition to the Natural History Museum in London, which does a superb job, the regional museums also play a key role. I have some illustrative figures for the Natural History Museum in Oxford. It is visited by 72 per cent of the primary schools and 94 per cent of the secondary schools in the local education authority area, and the majority of these visiting groups receive a taught session from an education officer. More than 400,000 visitors arrived at the museum last year, many of them children, and more than 1 million visitors went to the website, yet the funding for this important work is very precarious. I am sure that similar figures could be produced for the other major regional museums. Again, I hope that the Minister will confirm that the Government are committed to continuing their funding for educational and outreach work in regional, as well as national, museums and collections. I end with a quotation from the late American biologist and writer, Stephen Jay Gould. In his book Wonderful Life he writes: ""Taxonomy (the science of classification) is often undervalued as a glorified form of filing, with each species in its folder, like a stamp in its prescribed place in an album: but taxonomy is a fundamental and dynamic science, dedicated to exploring the causes of relationships and similarities among organisms. Classifications are theories about the basis of natural order, not dull catalogues compiled only to avoid chaos"." I hope that the Minister’s reply will both be more than a dull catalogue and show how the Government intend to avoid future chaos in their approach to taxonomy.