After some nights of sleep, I have come to the conclusion that moving forward with splitting the genus is the only sensible thing to do. The longer we wait with renaming Drosophila melanogaster, the more complex the situation is going to be. The
graphic representations of the paraphyletic genus Drosophila that are circulating around the internet are only a dressed down version, in that they ignore a substantial part of the paraphyly (aka, it looks not as bad as it actually is):
Well, here is the full story:
Once we get
Sophophora melanogaster out of the way, there is not a real hold-up for further taxonomic revisions, and the field won't be longer hold hostage by the
Sophophora melanogaster problem but individual researchers can actually do their revisions.
