Response to the Point of View of Gregory B. Pauly, David M. Hillis, and David C. Cannatella, by the Anuran Subcommittee of the Ssar/hl/asih Scientific and Standard English Names List

Abstract

The Point of View by Gregory Pauly, David Hillis, and David Cannatella misrepresents the motives and activities of the anuran subcommittee of the Scientific and Standard English Names Committee, contains a number of misleading statements, omits evidence and references to critical literature that have already rejected or superseded their positions, and cloaks the limitation of their nomenclatural approach in ambiguous language. Their Point of View is not about promoting transparency in the process of constucting the English Names list, assuring that its taxonomy is adequately reviewed, or promoting nomenclautural stability in any global sense. Rather, their Point of View focuses in larger part on a single publication, The Amphibian Tree of Life, which is formally unrelated to the Standard English Names List, and promotes an approach to nomenclauture mistakenly asserted by them to be compartible with both the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature and one of its competitros. the PhyloCode.