Ok, no problem, quote cut.
But…isn’t that lack of distinction why they are common names and not scientific names?
Is “humu humu nuku nuku apua’a” (Hawaiian) a bad common name because it encompasses 2 species in the same genus?
They “stick” colloquially because they are what laypersons will find easiest to remember, which may well be geared toward the either the most “typical” or most distinctive (to human observers) feature that can be quickly observed without specific equipment (e.g. coloration in dragonflies)?
Or, as another user put it:
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The Right to the Invention of a Common Name is the name of the topic. This:
at least suggests the possibility that maybe you would like to be the one.
There is a difference between marginal and marginalised and context matters. The bigger picture here is not some process of exclusion through which certain taxa are pushed to the linguistic margins. The process is quite the reverse, taxa enter the vernacular with common names by virtue of being noticed and talked about. “Marginalisation” is an active process that involves something being pushed aside (or at least it’s what it means in discussion of social processes).
iNat already has a bit of problem with people who game the system in search of whatever notoriety attaches to having the largest number of pointless IDs, etc. Why anybody would think they are being helpful or look clever by agreeing with an observation of Plants is unclear to me but it does suggest what would happen if iNat opened the door to people making up common(ish)/vernacular names.
To be clear, I love poetry and I love poetic common names. The wandering tattler is one of my favourite birds for no reason other than the name. But iNat is a learning tool for building understanding of biodiversity and it should be allowed to be just that. It’s a large enough task without complicating things unnecessarily.
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- New user learning the platform?
- “bump” an observation in the notifications of the Observer or identifier(s) to bring attention back to it in a single click (instead of a comment)?
- Trying to get community ID to the correct taxonomy but only IDing to their own comfort level?
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Happy to discuss this but off topic here. Some of what I’ve been seeing pretty clearly has nothing to do with those explanations.
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Yikes. Ok, well, maybe I’ve misrepresented myself through poor choice of words…
But to be crystal clear:
The Right to the Invention of a Common Name
As in, the right for anyone.
Not just for me!
I would have hoped it suggests the possibility that I would like to have a voice.
Not be “the one” voice.
I am pretty unconvinced by any notion of a single voice in this particular instance.
It seems out of step with the notion of common names. And out of synch with iNaturalist.
I’d be more interested in a plurality of voices, personally.
That’s not to say I don’t recognise the complexity of this.
I am not suggesting to just “open the doors” as you put it.
I am suggesting the existing prerequisite for sources seems somewhat problematic at times - especially for unnamed species.
What about those which aren’t noticed and aren’t talked about?
Which have never been noticed or talked about?
I totally get that there is a historical precedent in the how common names have been formed thus far. But for the unnamed, by not talking about them, by not naming them, is that not marginalising them to some extent? Doesn’t the limiting of our common names to those which already exist reinforce existing taxonomic bias?
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I can see that you want to promote more awareness for unpopular, unknown, unnoticed life forms. But there is another thread about including actual common names in local languages.
There IS a heritage of names for plants that are used for food, or medicine, or making stuff. While what interests scientists doesn’t draw the same need for ‘common’ names.
Creating a shiny new common name, won’t solve your problem with unnoticed life forms.
Similar to the way places with extreme cold weather have a huge vocabulary for that. Or rain forest residents have many names for ‘green’.
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That bit is not so simple. Again, I will take Lithuanian example. In our small country we have several dialects. So, if you have a company of western Lithuanian, eastern Lithuanian and southern Lithuanian, and they are all talking about a mushroom Imleria badia, they will not understand each other. Because southerner will use the name which westerner applies to Suillus luteus and easterner will use the name which is unfamiliar to westerner and only marginally known to southerner. Meanwhile common name coined by specialists is used in guides, in media and is generally known to most of the public. There are also similar examples with plants.
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That is absolutely true. In Greenland, they have more names for lichens than for vascular plants.
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Regional dialects are like that. However, the proportion of the public in most countries who have daily access to field guides and follow the terminology they employ is small. Among those folks the official common name (if that isn’t too absurd a term) may be used but elsewhere not so much. Perhaps Lithuania is different, but around here people call things what their parents called them, even if they learned something different in school. I’ve given up explaining that herons aren’t cranes, in most social contexts.
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Yes - I wondered if @pmeisenheimer’s comments were connected to that - I thought I read a post on another thread in regard to that. So for further clarity…
My thoughts are in no way whatsoever representative of a desire to intrude on existing vernacular names. In fact, my words are really only in relation to UK invertebrates, as that’s my field of interest and location at present.
I’m not sure this is comparable. Most countries have a huge diversity of invertebrate life. A huge amount of which is easily visible, but simply ignored. UK is species poor, but we have 27000 insects, most without common names. We have 600 or so birds, all with common names.
We can’t solve society’s disregard for invertebrate life.
We can however, debate ways to raise awareness of that which is right in front of people.
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But if your UK invertebrate is a butterfly, then it has a recognised common name.
People like birds, so they get names. Cute, cuddly, pretty = a name.
It seems a lot of recent ‘common’ names are simply translating the Latin / Greek binomial.
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Same situation is everywhere in the world. But there is difference between general public and naturalist public, who knows that heron is heron and stork is stork, so to say. Or at least they want to learn. That is the reason why common name should not always follow an established folk name. In the end, even English “established folk name” may mean one thing in England, another in North America and third thing in Australia.
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How would you define taxonomic bias?
The things we don’t know, taxonomic or otherwise, are a problem, but incomplete information is a fact of life. All you can do is work away at it. Most living things don’t have names because we don’t know they exist in any but the vaguest sense. Is that a bias or just the way things are?
The biases that stop us from filling the gaps in that kind of knowledge are mostly economic. Taxonomy costs money. Yes we have named things and left others undescribed for anthropocentric reasons. Language is a means of communication among people. If we, as a society, care enough about other living things to want to talk about them we will give them names in the usual way. Will we ever get to the point that every insect species has a common name in every local language? That’s doubtful, and not just because cryptic species are an issue.
If you are saying that there needs to be greater understanding and appreciation of organisms that don’t figure in our daily lives, I agree. Ecosystems are complicated things with a lot of components we understand poorly. I think iNat is doing good things on that front and will get better at doing it with time. I think that getting into naming things and the arguments that would inevitably follow would be an unproductive distraction for an organization with limited resources and rapidly expanding demands within its existing mandate.
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Exactly - this is the historical precedent. But, this is highly problematic, isn’t it?
Don’t we need to be teaching our children about the full range of species that are out there?
Not just the ones which are thought to be cute, cuddly and pretty?
But also the ones which society thinks are ugly and scary… but are actually harmless, and many…really, rather wonderful to behold?
Of the 27000 insects in the UK, only 70 are butterflies.
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I am not suggesting that one million people provide their own parallel nomenclature. But, there could, in theory, be a system where people could join together to create the nomenclature. Some sort of crowd consensus, for example, which might only involve a single name entering the public realm eventually. I’m not saying this is even an ideal solution. I just wanted to be clear that I am not suggesting “uninformative chaos”.
Re: the prerequisite for these to be coined by “experts” only. Looking at our equivalent across the pond - the dipterist Steven Falk is also naming our Syrphidae. He has invited public input on these names through his Twitter - so he at least seems open to crowd-sourced input. Looking at his names so far, most seem relatively simple also - either descriptors of visible traits, or based on information that he mentions in the description of the genus. e.g. Nothing that entails particular expertise.
The first thing that comes up on Google looks ok to me.
( from Nature)
" Taxonomic bias, also referred to as taxonomic chauvinism, is pervasive in biodiversity research. This bias stems from disparities in our knowledge of different organisms, and in the extent to which they are the focus of scientific research, across a wide range of biological disciplines"
Coming from a paper which suggests something particularly relevant…:
“Our results show that societal preferences, rather than research activity, strongly correlate with taxonomic bias, which lead us to assert that scientists should advertise less charismatic species and develop societal initiatives (e.g. citizen science) that specifically target neglected organisms. Ensuring that biodiversity is representatively sampled while this is still possible is an urgent prerequisite for achieving efficient conservation plans and a global understanding of our surrounding environment.”
Maybe. But there is already an existing space for users to suggest names and other users to flag and decide what counts and what doesn’t. So like it or not, the issues around common names are ongoing to some extent. E.g. the debate about Sarcophagidae
I just think there is a grey area here for some unnamed species which perhaps could be dealt with differently. I’ll be sad if Fly Death Fungi gets taken down as @joe_fish suggests, just because it doesn’t have expansive precedence. If I had a vote, I would vote for it to remain in place.
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So taxonomic bias is the fact that some taxa are more investigated than others. Yes this is a problem and has been understood to be a problem for some time…
There is no grey area. The iNat policy is unambiguous. Creation of new vernacular names is not permitted. Flags, as it has been explained to me, are reflections of perceived policy breaches, not mere differences of opinion.
Every time this happens a volunteer curator has to spend time and effort sorting it out. I want iNat to expend it’s resources wisely, permitting curators to curate rather than dealing with arguments about vernacular names. If there are external bodies with competence to adjudicate what constitutes a common name then let them do it. Otherwise, provide some kind of evidence of prior common use somewhere or stick to scientific names.
The lack of vernacular names is a correlate of our ignorance of biodiversity not its cause. If people want to be involved in such an initiative it seems to me to be a perfectly valid undertaking for various reasons even if the idea that it is going to shift the focus of research funding by any measurable amount is implausible. The issue here is whether a volunteer-dependent organization with limited resources that is already challenged by an enormous, rapid influx of new users should take on such an initiative. If I had a vote I would vote no.
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Yes, teaching is necessary. But in this case, there will be huge cultural barrier to overcome. Recognition of organisms by general society is based on: 1) economical salience (economically important species or species used in everyday life); 2) morphological/behavioural salience (species with outstanding morphological and/or behavioural traits, often culturally important species); 3) ecological/geographical salience (species encountered in the area and the more frequent species); 4) size salience (larger species, notwithstanding organism group – microscopic species are „invisible“ and therefore non-existent to most of people). So, the organisms that fall out of this system - many insects, fungi, etc. are difficult to explain and teach.
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I am a GINK (green no kids) but teaching our children about nature? Absolutely.
Start right.
Planting a wild garden, for her imminent baby! (And she is in the UK, loves beetles, kindred soul?)
http://roachling.blogspot.com/2020/07/big-changes-part-two-in-garden-and.html
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It depends on the context. There are several alternative common names available for both species. So if you need to communicate the difference, it’s better to use them (or the scientific names). It would appear that native Hawaiians never found a practical need to make the distinction, so their language reflects that.
It all really comes down to how the names are being used, rather than what the names actually are. If used as an opaque label, it really doesn’t matter what the name is, so long as everyone uses it consistently. The problems start when people start using names semantically as a guide to identification. When done uncritically, this can often be highly misleading.
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