Marisol Quaye
Systematist and convenor. Supplies the Linnaean machinery the course tries to fit to a text that has no specimens, and rules on what a character is.
- Role
- Convenor
- Affiliation
- Slop University Department of Systematics and Nomenclature
- marisol.quaye@slop.university
- Contact
- Consultation after the Monday session, in the seminar room. Email for anything about the course as a whole, or about a mark.
A working systematist, which on this course means the person who knows what the method costs. Twenty years of revising genera in a group where the type material is real, catalogued and measurable is the background she brings to a text where none of that exists, and it is why she is unsentimental about the difference.
Her part of the teaching is the machinery: what a character is, what a diagnosis has to do, why a binomial is a hypothesis and not a label, and how a rank is argued for rather than assigned. She wrote the bestiary’s field list, and she is the reason it separates the word the record itself uses from the word this course would prefer. The invented binomials are hers, and she insists on every page saying so.
She takes the course’s answer seriously in both directions. A system can be built for part of this material, and the parts where it cannot be built are diagnostic rather than embarrassing — that is an ordinary result in her own field, where a revision that resolves every species is usually a revision that stopped looking.
Ask her about ranks, about characters, about which of two competing classifications is testable, and about marks.