ABSTRACT
This chapter explains a delicate manoeuvring between extraordinary and ordinary claims often seen in accounts of scientific innovation, and describes the ways in which one of the envisaged innovations – DNA barcoding. It also describes how a way forward for DNA barcoding as a global standard for molecular species-naming has been navigated to date, without collective scientific assent. The chapter discusses Charles Godfray's, Diethard Tautz's and Paul Hebert's extraordinary proposals for a new science of taxonomy deemed appropriate for the twenty-first century. Godfray's suggestion was that taxonomy needed to shift from being a science with a 'distributed' organization to becoming one that was 'unitary'. Tautz's DNA-based scaffold would build on the strength of traditional systems whilst giving natural history museums new roles as molecular facilities and guardians of molecular and genomic diversity. Within parts of the taxonomic community, an 'integrative' taxonomic approach to the taxonomic crisis was valued.
