Interestingly, one of the authors on this new paper on Achalinus was lead author on another paper in 2019 in which three new species in this genus were described and named from Vietnam, in collaboration with Vietnamese colleagues. Near as I can tell, the three new species were each named with the first names of family members of the lead author: A. juliani, A. timi , and A. emilyae and the proposed common names for each incorporate the first name of the family member (e.g., Julian’s Burrowing Snake). Nothing in these scientific or common names suggests the snakes are found in Vietnam and they certainly are not descriptive.
I read the paper and it’s as bad as you say. “Julian’s Burrowing Snake”, “Tim’s Burrowing Snake”, and “Emily’s Burrowing Snake”.
They are Vietnamese snakes, 6 of the 8 authors in the describing paper are Vietnamese, nearly all of the holotypes and paratypes were found by Vietnamese persons, and surprisingly to me in this case the research was even funded by a Vietnamese government grant…and yet the snakes themselves will be forever tagged with German first names for both scientific and common names, names which don’t tell us anything about the snakes.
(Another conflict disclosure - in the past I’ve communicated with said author regarding a project I’m working on and he kindly provided assistance. I have no grudge with him as an individual at all, he is no Hoser. My disagreement is with this particular policy which is common practice across taxonomy.)
Something that was not brought up but with such overwhelming odds, in this case, for these snakes to be named after Vietnamese people, it makes me wonder if those authors really cared what nationality these names came from. In which case, we could learn valuable lesson from their example, that it’s only a problem when someone mentions it. Having that said, if we disagree with a name, let the offense pass like a river over stone.
What’s in a name? Some of these replies focus on a name’s functionality—accuracy of description, originality, ease of memory. Others focus on a name’s merit—worth of the honoree, appropriateness of the designation, etc. (Zug rhymes with bug so it is especially memorable. Just saying.)
Purely descriptive names work best on a smaller scale. For instance, in the US we have a lot of places named after people—possibly a bias towards the individual—or possibly because only so many places can be called Greenville before it gets confusing. Greenville, NC or SC?
I’m not against critters, plants, or fungi being named after people because as humans we need to recognize our responsibility to be stewards of all living things. Stewardship belongs to us all and names going forward should reflect that. Have a great day!
Maybe there was no disrespect in this case and the co-authors were fine with these names. But if I were working in another country, with support from the biologists, citizens, and government of that country, and I had the honor of naming one or more new species from that country in collaboration with local biologists, would I name those species after my family members? No. I’d try to find names that reflect something about that country.
Exactly jnstuart. I feel a lot of contemporary political lines sneaking into the discussion with people trying to chide others for being “offended” or such…but why can’t we just all strive for best practices? No one has proposed a measure to strike down all honorifics and replace them with new names. But we can urge our community to strive for names that serve the best possible purpose for education, conservation, and science in the regions where we work. And I fail to see how honorifics are best practice, especially honorifics focused on ourselves and those connected to us rather than those connected to the animals.
I mean that ‘cicada’ is both the common name for the entire group, as well as one of the many genera specifically —> so you inevitably get people meaning to just add a broad ID of cicadas and actually IDing (incorrectly for Australia, USA, etc) to the genus accidentally
It’s a Linnaean name, so at the time (1758!) they figured that was the only group of cicadas out there. His genera are basically the equivalent of families nowadays but it was 50 years before the French scientist Latreille realized this and codified the level-up. Back then they weren’t really trying to make “scientific names” per se, they just needed Latin versions of the names in use at the time. But the idea of assigning unique names caught on, the Latin caught on, and then taxonomic splitting took off, and now we’re left with lots of examples like this, especially if you speak a Romance language.
Never been to Greenville, SC; but Greenville, NC was in fact named after an individual: Nathaniel Greene, Revolutionary War hero.
Still, if a patronymic can possibly have a descriptive meaning in addition, my mind is such that I will use it. Greenville is indeed a very green place. This even applies to names from other languages: on the Kitsap Peninsula in Washington State (that’s two more honorific toponyms, one honoring a famous Native warrior, the other, the first US President), there is an Elfendahl Pass – again the name of an individual, but it can also be translated as Elvesdale, which is much more evocative of imagery.
And in taxonomy, there are puns on individuals’ names, too. In the Onagraceae is the genus Megacorax. It means “big raven,” and was meant to honor Peter Raven. Still, you can think of a big raven if you prefer.
I see your point about the whole act of naming and classifying organisms is artificial and inherently human-centric as we’re doing it to benefit our knowledge and understanding. But there is no other way, it must be artificial, and it is artificial with intended utility. As such, the core of my argument is that some of that utility is lost or distracted from when using human names.
But - I think some users here have highlighted various situations where using human names makes some sense for practicality purposes. Still, as someone else suggested, I think it should be at the bottom of the list of options when coming up with new names.
Interesting discussion, and it made me think that it’s time to consider unique identifier codes for all species, using only numbers and symbols (maybe letters, or perhaps a newly invented character set). Or is there already a system like that?
It seems redundant though? If you assigned a unique identifier code you would still have to go through the exact same messes every time a species was split, lumped, redefined, assigned to a new genus, etc., you would just have to track the code with the name everywhere it went and make up new codenames every time a new name was made up. The code would never replace the name as it would be far too difficult to memorize and utilize, so you’d just have an arbitrary list of characters that would trail behind the same names that are always used.
It would annoy me for the same reason that forcing “authority” to be listed after the name is annoying - more clutter, more hassle, less readability, without gaining any positive utility.
It would made sense if there was some specific databasing/computer processing utility for it, of course.
I’m with you there. It can make sense in certain contexts, such as a paper discussing the taxonomic history of the organism, but in most contexts, there is no real use for it. Although I will add that seeing the initial L. after a scientific name is a cue that this taxon has been taxonomically stable from the very beginning of the binomial system.
Having a descriptors name after binominal is what iNat lacks. You can easily search a descriptor’s name without any special utilities, there’s one called Internet.
At least for animals, I disagree. The L. tells you that it was a species described early on, but that original concept of the species is usually beyond useless because it was so general, the description so brief, and it predates more modern splitting. This is one reason why I prefer the way the plant code uses taxonomic authority, since it lets you credit a person who may have redefined the species limits in a given genus later on. If someone is basing an ID off the one-sentence concept Linnaeus had without taking into account all the other lookalike species we’ve recognized since then, then I know they don’t know what they’re talking about. The animal code is too strict in rewarding inertia at the cost of clarity.
The Phylocode people would like to speak to you. It doesn’t have very many fans, for several reasons. Though in some ways online registration is creating a system sort of like your identifier codes. When you register a new animal species name (like Stackelberginia cerberus) on Zoobank (the official clearinghouse nowadays), it reserves a long string of characters that serve as a unique identifier (check out http://zoobank.org/NomenclaturalActs/026a5107-bb60-49b3-b17c-80c1385d6fe9 for this example). And various bioinformatics groups are working to make a system of unique LSIDs for specimens, scientists, taxa, museums, etc. Given how much of taxonomy is moving to computer-run databases, that’s how computers work with the data, not in Latin binomials. But sadly, they’re impossible to use for non-computers (aka humans).
One case I find intriguing is when a genus named after a person was translated into a descriptive common name. The genus Oldenlandia is named after Henrik Bernard Oldenland. But since “olden land” can also be taken as “the old country,” it became the common name, Old World diamond flower.