Yes, "
Bull. ABC" = African Bird Club bulletin...
Do you know what it said?
I read it on Friday. Its conclusion was that Cape Parrot deserves to be treated as a separate species.
However, the paper didn't actually seem to be about the taxonomy of the Cape Parrot at all. To me, it seemed as though the main purpose of the paper was to show how the Tobias criteria are a panacea for solving taxonomic problems (which it's obvious to anyone who's given the subject more than a few seconds thought that they are not).
The first half of the paper reviews every previous attempt to assess the taxonomic status of Cape Parrot, even attempts which only dealt with the subject in passing, and doesn't have a much of a good word to say about any of them. Then, in the second half of the paper, along come the authors, with their fantastic new tool, and, lo and behold, it's all really simple after all. It almost looks as though Collar and Fishpool have been specifically looking for a case where the outcome was obvious but where previous taxonomic studies have been of poor quality, leading to ongoing uncertainty, so that use of the Tobias criteria would stand out as being uniquely superior (whereas all that was actually needed was a thorough review of the evidence using standard taxonomic techniques, and the same answer would have been arrived at).
The paper ends with a discussion of the relevance of taxonomic ranks in conservation decision making, which directly contradicts what Collar wrote in his BB article "A species is what I say it is".
To my mind, there seems to be an ongoing and concerted campaign, associated with Birdlife International, to undermine critical thinking in taxonomy and replace it with something cheap and dirty. This is the latest in a long line of similar contributions from the same team, and the whole thing just seems so absurd now that while I'd like to give those involved the benefit of the doubt, I cannot help but think that something slightly sinister is going on. My hunch is that Birdlife is trying to use the criteria as a way of making itself appear indispensable to conservation policy-makers, by "proving" that the kinds of integrative approaches that are standard practice among modern taxonomists are somehow flawed through inconsistency and subjectivity (even going as far as describing the Tobias criteria as objective, when they patently are not).
