Ravenna's vanity press, some shameless scientific self-promotion and Pyrolirion
Nolo Contendere (Sat, 09 Oct 2010 15:48:25 PDT)

I have tried twice to address such vanity taxonomy with proposals to
amend the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature, the second time
with input from Peter Raven and Peter Goldblatt, but only the first time
(1984) did I actually go ahead and submit it. Shot down. The second
time, my advisers STILL didn't think the committee would vote positively
in majority, and I never sent it in. Ravenna does not his send his
self-published journals to any institution in the U.S., ostensibly to
make it difficult for Peter Goldblatt or I to monitor his mischief.
When I was in Chile, I was told that a mysterious fire had done an
undetermined amount of damage to Ravenna's private herbarium, home of
numerous holotypes of his taxa (he will always choose a holotype from
his own specimen made from cultivation, even if there specimens
available, represented by several duplicates at various herbaria, that
can be assigned to the new species. Raven, before his retirement, was
exploring legal action in Chile to try and get hundreds of herbarium
specimens back that were loaned to Ravenna in the 70's. He also has
material from NY and B. All may have been destroyed in the fire, which
some botanists in Chile told me that they thought he set deliberately.

In case anyone is interested, In my paper in the new book from Aarhus
University Press in Denmark, "Diversity, Phylogeny, and Evolution in the
Monocotyledons: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on
the Comparative Biology of the Monocotyledons," I present genetic
evidence that there may have been early reticulation (hybridization) in
the lineages of the Hippeastreae. In the same paper, Pyrolirion is
shown, via both chloroplast and nuclear DNA sequences to be a member of
the Eustephieae (sister to the other three genera), and no immediate
relative of Zephyranthes and Habranthus.

Alan