Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2020 September 21

= September 21 =

Taxonomy of Euchile and Prosthechea
Higgins wrote in 2003 using genetic evidence that showed Euchile and Prosthechea are closely related. He made a case based on morphology that Euchile should be separate from Prosthechea. Current lists show Euchile renamed as Prosthechea. What was the basis of this decision? I can't find the relevant article. 167.95.98.207 (talk) 15:48, 21 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Can you say where you see these current lists? Our Prosthechea article just seems to say something similar to what you described. It seems we don't yet have an article on Euchile so it just redirects to Prosthechea I guess the best interim solution until someone creates one. Of course it can take a while for such proposals to be accepted, or they can never be but without knowing where you're seeing this it's IMO difficult to comment. Nil Einne (talk) 23:28, 21 September 2020 (UTC)
 * This forum (last paragraph on the first post) on orchids mentions that the Royal Horticultural Society refers to Euchile as Prosthechea now. Several commercial websites that sell orchids also mention the name change.167.95.98.207 (talk) 17:34, 22 September 2020 (UTC)
 * What do you mean by now? It says they refer to those 2 species as Prosthechea at that time in 2016, but my point is not so much to suggest it may have changed in 2020, but that from your earlier post, it sounds like you think they changed from Euchile to Prosthechea back to Euchile but it's not clear to me that's what happened. Our article does suggest that Prosthechea is fairly recent and prior to that most species were in different genus, but it's not clear to me if those 2 species were original in  Euchile or what. Even if they were, this is also partly besides the point as I think maybe you're assuming that it went Euchile to Prosthechea to Euchile to Prosthechea to Euchile. But from reading that post, it sounds like although the RHS can be fast at times, they can also be slow, as a lot of those sort of more consumer focused organisations are. Based on this and also post #14, I think the most likely scenario is the RHS accepted Prosthechea when it was first proposed but then for whatever reason never accepted transferring those 2 species back? to Euchile even if it was proposed soon after Prosthechea. It sounds like RHS mostly follow Kew, and indeed Kew seem to treat the 2 as synonyms [//powo.science.kew.org/taxon/urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:1007889-2] but you get the same issue. If it's simply not following the proposed separation, I think there is a reasonable chance there is no published reason. What the reason is, I don't know why but I wouldn't be surprised if few people know why and it's a combination of randomness, politics, people involved, conservativeness, not wanting to change to often, etc. While I'm far from an expert, I don't think this is particularly unusual. Meanwhile it's easily possible researchers and taxonomists in particular are following the proposal. Alternatively it's also possible most taxonomists and researchers have for whatever reason also largely ignored the proposal, whether because they disagree with it or other reasons like they feel the evidence for separation isn't strong enough, the paper simply didn't receive much attention, whatever. Again, far from an expert but I'm fairly sure this happens all the time. People propose taxonomical reorganisations but it's not followed. Indeed you may get lots of competing proposals over time. Nil Einne (talk) 03:23, 23 September 2020 (UTC)
 * I had a quick look, and it sounds like those 2 species were generally placed in Encyclia before, in fact we still have Encyclia citrina although not Encyclia mariae. I don't know whether they were in Euchile at some time before, but this seems to reaffirm my view that what happened is that moving them to Prosthechea has been somewhat accepted, but moving them to Euchile has not. Nil Einne (talk) 03:31, 23 September 2020 (UTC)