TY  - JOUR
T1  - Conflicting Morphological, Molecular, Ecological, and Behavioral Evidence Requires Explicit Decision Rules in Integrative Insect Taxonomy
A1  - Zsolt Kovács
A1  - Katalin Szabo
A1  - Gabor Nagy
A1  - Eszter Toth
JF  - Entomological Research Letters
JO  - Entomol Res Lett
SN  - 3108-639X
Y1  - 2023
VL  - 3
IS  - 1
DO  - 10.51847/AhZTeCqZwf
SP  - 131
EP  - 141
N2  - Integrative insect taxonomy gains power from combining morphology, molecular data, ecology, behavior, and life-history information, yet disagreement among these domains creates an inferential problem that cannot be solved by simple evidence counting. This article develops a systematic framework for treating concordance and conflict as explicit taxonomic states. The framework separates what an evidence class measures from its reliability, independence, taxonomic relevance, and plausible causes of discordance. Published insect cases show that morphology and molecular evidence can strongly agree, but also that morphotypes, barcodes, phylogenomic relationships, coalescent partitions, ecological associations, and behavioral barriers may disagree at different biological and taxonomic scales. The proposed rules therefore reject a fixed hierarchy of evidence and instead require claim-level reconciliation. Ecology–genomics conflict is treated especially cautiously because host association, geography, environment, gene flow, and analytical design can produce overlapping signals. The framework is intended to structure transparent taxonomic reasoning, not to provide numerical weights, universal thresholds, or an empirically validated classifier. Its principal contribution is a reproducible vocabulary for deciding when concordance is informative, when discordance is explainable, and when uncertainty should remain unresolved pending stronger evidence.
UR  - https://esvpub.com/article/conflicting-morphological-molecular-ecological-and-behavioral-evidence-requires-explicit-decision-8y4ebxtajsaleuf
ER  -