GALINA N. AZARKINA, YURI M. MARUSIK & TATYANA V. ANTONENKO 1The Laboratory of Invertebrate Systematics, The Institute of Systematics and Ecology of Animals, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Frunze Street 11, Novosibirsk 630091, Russia. E-mail: [email protected] 2Institute for Biological Problems of the North, Portovaya Street 18, Magadan 685000, Russia. E-mail: [email protected]...

The present chaotic state of diatom taxonomy presents both significant difficulties and large opportunities for paleolimnologists. Lack of complete and generally available taxonomic treatises and rapid and substantial changes in nomenclature make it necessary for persons using diatom populations to infer environmental conditions to become more deeply and directly involved in diatom systematics,...

The relation between method, concept and theory in science is complicated. I seek to shed light on that relation by considering an instance of it in systematics: The additional challenges phylogeneticists face when reconstructing phylogeny not at a single level, but simultaneously at multiple levels of the hierarchy. How does this complicate the task of phylogenetic inference, and how might it ...

Standard concepts of nuclear physics explaining the systematics of ground state spins in nuclei by the presence of specific coherent terms in the nucleon-nucleon interaction were put in doubt by the observation that these systematics can be reproduced with high probability by randomly chosen rotationally invariant interactions. We review the recent development in this area, along with new origi...