Response

摘要

Zhang misrepresents the past of natural history and the present of molecular sequence collection. His Letter reflects the exact tension I described in my paper between the naturalist and experimentalist perspectives.rnFirst, although GenBank's objective may be to document model organisms, in February 2009 there were no fewer than 187,136 species represented in GenBank (7)-I.e., 5 to 10% of all known species. GenBank is thus already an extraordinary sampling of biological diversity, unmatched by any museums of natural history, and on par with the morphological databanks mentioned by Zhang.rnSecond, GenBank certainly contains a "considerable amount of unidentified or misidentified sequences," but all significant natural history museums likewise contain "unidentified and misidentified" specimens.