Lumpers vs. Splitters

Today all my assumptions about maple trees were shattered.

No, it wasnt quite so dramatic, but our visiting botanist did throw a wrench into our useful maple categorization method. See,  we use to call maple trees that had smooth leaves sugar maple (Acer saccharum), and trees that had fuzzy leaves black maple (Acer nigrum). According to the guidebook, this is the way to differentiate them. But according to our botanist, in fact, sugar maples can be quite diverse. You can find leaves that are just a little fuzzy and even some that are quite fuzzy. He believes that the Hudson River Valley might be home to a special population of sugar maples that have this unusual fuzzy tendency.

This is a classic lumper/splitter debate. According to our good friend Wikipedia, “The lumper/splitter
problem occurs when there is the need to create classifications and assign examples to them, for example schools of literature , biological taxa and so
on. A “lumper” is an individual who takes a gestalt view of a definition, and assigns examples broadly,
assuming that differences are not as important as signature similarities. A “splitter” is an individual who takes precise definitions, and creates new
categories to classify samples that differ in key ways.”

I’m definitely a person in the lumper camp, and this past week I was really having trouble buying the differences between the A. saccharum and A. nigrum. To me, I just figured they were all hybrids.  Well, now according to Dave, they’re all just sugars…. but, if we brought in another botanist, he’d probably have a different assessment.

So who’s up for a PhD thesis on the classification of maples?

Definitely not me. If there’s anything i learned today it’s that I should never