The taxonomist's lament, pt 2 - when names are just really bad.
So yesterday, I discussed the problems that can happen when scientific names for living things are offensive. This was prompted by a discussion I’m having with colleagues about older names that might apply to a recently-recognized species. I then discussed the most common kind of offensiveness in biological nomenclature – patronyms honoring people who, in hindsight, should not be honored.
Sometimes, names are offensive not because they honor someone bad, but because they’re just flat-out offensive in and of themselves. Fortunately, these are few in number. But those that are offensive can be really offensive.
The best example I know is the scientific name of the red-shafted flicker, a kind of woodpecker found in western North America. It was treated as Colaptes cafer for a long time, but it’s usually considered to be a subspecies of northern flicker (Colaptes aurata cafer) these days. The yellow-shafted flicker we see east of the Rockies is Colaptes aurata aurata.
The name cafer was imparted by a German naturalist, Johann Gmelin, in the 1780’s, and it arose from a mistake I’ve never been able to understand. Gmelin thought the specimen he saw came not from western North America, but from southern Africa, where some indigenous groups were called “kaffirs.” This word is considered to be an ethnic slur in South Africa and surrounding countries – maybe not as bad as the n-word, but bad enough to get you in trouble if you use it in that region.
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Another reason names can be offensive is if they insult one person in particular. Using nomenclature to insult people is considered highly unethical, but it sometimes happens.
Usually, it happens by mistake. There was no offense intended, even if it occurred. My favorite is a moth named after someone named Dyer. They just put an -ia after his name.
That said, most of us can think of people we’d like to insult with nomenclature. A close friend knows of a word in ancient Greek for a person who has sex with goats; he won’t share that word, as he’s reserving it for his own use.
Some friends and I once discussed doing this about 25 years ago. An entomologist discovered that the name Syntarsus had been applied to both a small theropod dinosaur and a beetle. The beetle was named first, and so the dinosaur would have to be renamed. Ordinarily, professional etiquette would require one to notify the original author of a name of the synonymy. That person could then correct the situation. This particular entomologist claimed he was told the paleontologist who named the dinosaur Syntarsus was dead, and so he published his own replacement name – Megapnosaurus – in an obscure entomological journal that very few libraries get.
The entomologist was trying to be whimsical – Megapnosaurus literally means “big dead reptile.” But many paleontologists thought this was in poor taste; the dinosaur formerly called Syntarsus was rather small. But more to the point, the original namer of the dinosaur was very much alive, was aware of the synonymy, was working to correct the problem, and felt deeply insulted.
The entomologist claims he was told the paleontologist was dead, but the paleontologist was editor of a major paleontological journal at the time and had a page on his department’s web site. He wasn’t hard to find. Still, I take him at his word – that he was acting in good faith and not trying to upset anyone.
What the entomologist did wasn’t wrong, at least from the standpoint of biological nomenclature. He encountered a case of synonymy and replaced the junior synonym with a different name. But to a lot of us in my field, it was rude. So we started talking about finding a fossil horse somewhere that was only known from the hips and maybe hindlimbs and some vertebrae. We’d name it after him, forever linking his name with a horse’s ass.
This wasn’t a serious conversation – none of us was actually going to do this. But that’s how angry we were.
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So – what can we do about offensive taxon names?
If it’s a common name, we can change it easily enough. This was done for what we now call the long-tailed duck, which used to bear a name that would most politely be interpreted as “elderly Native American woman.”
But scientific names are another matter.
In 2018, someone submitted a proposal to the North American Checklist Committee (NACC) of the American Ornithological Society (AOS) to re-name the red-shafted flicker. The NACC maintains the standard checklist professional ornithologists are expected to use, and it’s also used by nearly all field guides, museum catalogs, and textbooks. But while the list indicates what the NACC regards to be valid species, subspecies, and regional variants, and while it can suggest the most appropriate genus name for a species, it does not – and cannot – govern the scientific names themselves.
To change the name, one would have to submit a proposal to the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. And they almost never change names for this reason.
Their rationale? It runs against the primary reasons we use biological nomenclature – stability and communication. The names are meant to allow communication among different communities, even if different people speak different languages. And we want the names to be as stable as possible, so that names are used consistently in the scientific literature in the long term. Change names, and searching for older papers on the animal you’re studying becomes more difficult. Change names, and different people might be using different names for the same animal, at least for a time.
I don’t know if a proposal to rename the red-shafted flicker has been put before the Commission, but in the past, such proposals have been rejected. And when asked for an explanation, the Commission will point to stability and communication, but they’ll also add further rationalizations – that some of these words weren’t offensive when they were first used, or that they might be offensive to someone who speaks English, but not to someone who speaks some other language. Why should we fix modern sensibilities on older names?
This came up in the Boverisuchus vs Weigeltosuchus controversy I discussed yesterday. One of the reviewers said we shouldn’t let “modern sensibilities” cloud our judgment. But being a Nazi has been a bad thing globally for 80 years, and beyond Germany for 15 or 20 years before that. Saying “Nazis are bad” isn’t a new form of sensibility; it’s been nearly universally understood that Nazis weren’t good guys for the better part of a century. (Yes, the current administration seems to be following the Nazi playbook. But very few people would voluntarily describe themselves as Nazis.)
In my opinion, the Commission is often too conservative in their approach. (Small-c conservative, meaning reluctant to change.) There are different levels of offensiveness, and stability really is important. I don’t know where the line between “offensive, but we’re stuck with it” and “so offensive that we must set stability aside” is, but as John Oliver once said, it’s fucking somewhere. A name based on a racial slur is surely on the “so offensive” side of that line.
Nevertheless, I’m skeptical the Commission will change it. Like I said, its members sometimes lose sight of broader issues because of their laser-like attention to stability.
At any rate – names like this are, fortunately, rare.
That’s all for now. Next time, I’ll bring up the relatively new phenomenon of taxonomic vandalism. And it really is an interesting thing to discuss.
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in which they were first discovered. So, within the 4-corners region of the US, where the first North American Hantavirus was first discovered--responsible for the 1993 outbreak of Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome, the nearest landmark for those first cases detected among the Navajo was (unfortunately) Muerto Canyon. So, for a short while, this new virus was named Muerto Canyon Virus (for the non-Spanish speakers, that means "Death" canyon). Well, cultural differences (and a failure to pre-identify any sensitivity) led to a real disaster. As the Navajo were interviewed to try to determine the source of spread, investigators soon found that not only is it very inappropriate to make direct and ongoing eye contact, but to discuss death was also NOT done, but rather viewed as the ultimate offensive discussion. So, they named the new virus "Death Canyon Virus" and expected the Navajo to discuss that... Sometimes one can only shake your head...
So, now the virus has to be renamed something. I can't say with certainty the alternative was not a somewhat petulant choice, but the virus became (and remains) "Sin Nombre Virus"... So, if you haven't caught on yet, the new choice was NO NAME VIRUS translated from the Spanish.
