This article was originally published on Undark.
George Washington’s palm tree. The laziness of Thomas Jefferson. The Hawk by Edward Harris. There are quite a few species with a name attached to them. Sometimes these names – known formally as eponyms – commemorate the original collector. Sometimes it is the family of a scientist member, a benefactor or head of governmenta colleague or even one celebrity. According to an official estimate, eponyms make up about 20 percent of all animal names used.
Many species got their namesakes during the early days of scientific collection, fueled in part by the wider colonization programs of European powers throughout the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. In recent years, however, that history has come under increasing scrutiny. For example, in 2020 in the midst of the protests After the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and the push to remove Confederate monuments, some ornithologists began to question whether birds named for Confederates and slave owners should be retitled.
Now an international group of researchers argues that it is time to move away from eponyms altogether. “In conclusion, we believe that naming species in honor of real humans is unnecessary and objectively difficult to justify,” the authors wrote in a statement. recent paper in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. “Earth’s biodiversity is part of a global heritage that should not be trivialized by association with a single human individual, regardless of their perceived worth.”
The paper’s authors wade into an ongoing and contentious debate — and the scientific institutions responsible for approving new species names aren’t budging.
The purpose of species naming — or nomenclature — is to ensure that scientific names are uniform across fields and research laboratories, said Luis Ceríaco, a commissioner at the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, which regulates the naming of animal species. “It’s a space to foster stability and promote universality in the use of names,” added Ceríaco. “What we want is to have a set of rules that really lets people know what they’re talking about when they refer to species.”
For this reason, the ICZN and its partner organization, The International Association of Plant Taxonomy, follow established codes that prioritize older names, changing them only for scientific and stability reasons.
Proposals to rename species due to social or political concerns have attracted both criticism And support. In February 2023, a group of ICZN Commissioners, including Ceríaco, put down a piece of paper against renaming species on ethical grounds. Deciding which eponyms to replace because of “perceived offensiveness” is not the job of the code, they wrote. “Due to the inherently subjective nature of making such assessments, it would be inappropriate for the Commission to make judgments on such moral issues, as there are no specific parameters to set thresholds for the offensiveness of a scientific name to a particular community or individual, either in the present or in the future.”
However, other scientists have been happy to step into the hole.
The urge to reassess problematic species names is not new. Consider the case of Anophthalmus hitleri, a cave beetle named after Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, whose namesake — in addition to honoring a historic genocidaire — has made the insect a target for some collectors. But despite calls for the namesake to be dropped, the species has not been renamed by the ICZN. “The logic so far in keeping ‘Hitleri’ is that the name is not offensive in and of itself,” says entomologist May Berenbaum. noted in a 2010 issue of American Entomologist. “Frankly, a scientific name that condemns a species to extinction at the hands of avid fascist memorabilia collectors is quite offensive, at least to me.”
More recently, in 2015, the Rhodes must fall movement – a reference to Cecil Rhodes, the former Prime Minister of British colonial South Africa – was launched discussions in botanical sciences on replacing “culturally offensive and inappropriate names”, which grew alongside similar debates in ornithology surrounding the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.
For some people, the stakes of such decisions may feel high. “Naming and language have power. The way you use language tells people whether they fit in or not,” said Earyn McGee, conservation biologist and organizer of Black Birders Week. told Undark in 2020. The refusal to change species names, she said, “tells black people and other people of color that they don’t matter, that they don’t matter.”
Such moves, in turn, have prompted some taxonomists to argue that renaming species injects political considerations into taxonomy, raising thorny questions. After all, where should scientists draw the line between good actors and bad? (Should species named for Queen Victoria be replaced? What about plant names that commemorate American slaveholders George Washington and Thomas Jefferson?)
“We have a code of ethics,” Ceríaco said, “and the ethics part says no one should knowingly invent a new name that is offensive.” However, he added that the ICZN emphasizes authors’ freedom to name species as they see fit, so that they also do not revise names that conflict with their code of ethics. “It is always the responsibility of the author. We strongly advise people to make sure that what they are about to set up will not cause offense to anyone.
The alternative, Ceríaco said, would be for the ICZN to review which names are acceptable, and open “a pandora’s box.” Allowing such revisions at all would impact the work of global researchers, conservationists and others who depend on a stable taxonomic framework. “We are not dismissive of arguments that the names are offensive,” he said. But, he added, the consequences of changing the names would be trickier than keeping them.
Not all researchers were convinced by ICZN’s argument. Some of them, like Patrícia Guedes — a biologist at the CIBIO Research Center in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources — came together in March 2023 and pointed out that eponyms were, in fact, more trouble than they were worth. Part of the problem with eponyms, they noted, was that the practice is inseparable from the colonial history of science: many early researchers came from colonizing European countries, and as a result many species were named after white, male upper-class Europeans. . In Africa alone, the researchers found that 1,565 species of birds, reptiles, amphibians and mammals — a quarter of the continent’s native vertebrates — are eponyms, the majority of which revered “settlers or people of colonial descent.”
“A name considered innocuous by some may be perceived as offensive by others, and names once considered innocuous are not necessarily viewed in the same way in a post-colonial world,” the authors wrote. Destroying all previous eponyms would be ethical, but impracticable, they conceded. Still, the authors argued that the ICZN could put taxonomists of the species’ native region in charge of renaming proposals.
Guedes told Undark it would be neater — and easier — to tighten the rules of the ICZN code to limit eponyms in the future. As long as organisms are named after humans, she said, such discussions about which names are appropriate will continue: “I’m sure there are ways to honor people who have contributed to science other than by giving their name to another living thing. to connect. “
Guedes and her colleagues face an uphill battle: Many taxonomists like eponyms. “I think in many, many cases it’s positive,” Ceríaco said. He described it himself about 40 speciessome of which are eponyms, including a type of viper named after James Hetfield of Metallica. (This is a bit of tradition in taxonomy: think Taylor Swift’s centipede, or that of Leonardo DiCaprio snake.) Such names are an opportunity to engage communities that generally pay no attention to such discoveries, he said. Eponyms also give researchers a chance to name species after scientists from the countries in which they are found, he added, such as an Angolan gecko that honors local scientist Francisco MP Goncalves.
“There are certainly unfortunate eponyms,” Stephen Heard, an ecologist and author of “Charles Darwin’s Barnacle and David Bowie’s Spider,” a book about eponyms, wrote in a Twitter post to Undark. “There are also wonderful ones that draw attention to undervalued figures in science, including Indigenous peoples, women and more.”
It’s an honor for a researcher to have a species named after him, said Brian Sidlauskas, an ichthyologist at Oregon State University. (He would know: there is a fish from the Amazon with his name on it.) But while he’s not interested in banning their use, he does think the ICZN could set up a process to scrap problematic names — perhaps through a panel of experts tasked with reviewing proposed name changes to consider. “There are really some names in history that are really offensive, so it’s a good idea to have a mechanism to change those,” he said. other researchers also turned off.
In addition, the ICZN’s stance against making changes for ethical reasons is a “classic slippery slope argument,” Sidlauskas said. “Obviously they don’t want to take responsibility for that. But if not them, who has the responsibility and the power?”
Others believe community-level naming practices should change regardless of what the ICZN does. “In the future, I think white Europeans should not be allowed to name species from countries that are not theirs after other white Europeans,” said Laura Jennings, a botanist at Kew Royal Botanic Gardens. Although she feels it is not her place to tell colleagues how to name species in their own country, she would refuse her own namesake. “My preference is to name species after a characteristic of the plant, a place name or a name in a local language,” she added. “Something that connects the plant to its native habitat.”
The wider community discussion isn’t going anywhere. The ICZN is currently working on the 5th edition of its formal code, Ceríaco said, which will be delivered for community comment and debate before ratification in the next two years. That’s part of the reason he and his colleagues position clearly earlier this year, he said – to promote debate.
It’s a goal Guedes’ team shares. “I don’t think the real change will happen anytime soon. But what we wanted to do was create space for discussion,” she said.
“And I think we’re achieving that,” she added.
Asher Elbein is a writer from Austin, Texas. His work has appeared in The Oxford American, The Texas Observer, and The Bitter Southerner.
This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.