![]() Yong appears to favor changing both names for eponymous animals like Audubon’s warbler, but also seems to think that’s just as easy as changing common names. (As far as I know, the equivalent botanical body hasn’t weighed in yet.) So if you want to change “bad” animal names, as Yong appears to favor, you have to make it clear whether you want both common and scientific names changed, or just the common ones. This is why the body concerned with the scientific names of animals, the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), has refused to change the scientific names of any animal except in a few special cases that involve biology and taxonomy-but not ideology or politics (see below). If you change the scientific name, it affects the entire scientific literature around that species, potentially causing mass confusion from Linnaeus’s time until today. But changing the scientific name of a species is a big deal, because those are the names used throughout the entire scientific literature to identify species and to link biological information about that species, like Panthera leo as the scientific name of the lion. Doing the former, like changing the name “Audubon’s warbler”, in which the scientific name isn’t eponymous, doesn’t affect much except the labels that bird aficionados give to the species. Whether common ones such as giraffe or scientific ones such as Giraffa camelopardalis, names act first as labels, allowing people to identify and classify living things.īut there’s a huge difference between changing common names and changing scientific ones. Yong does mention the two-names issue in one place, only in passing: The common name can vary from place to place, but the scientific name is constant throughout the world, as it’s used by scientists to identify animals. But there are two problems with it, the first more worrisome:ġ.) Yong seriously downplays the fact that every animal has at least two names, as I indicated above. To read it, click on the screenshot below, or if it’s paywalled I found the piece it archived here. It’s a good descriptor of the kerfuffle about naming, but fails on several counts. (The common name has in fact already been changed, with the warbler now called the “ yellow-rumped warbler.”) In many cases a person’s name will appear in both common and scientific names, but you can’t change the latter.Įd Yong’s latest piece in The Atlantic describes the political, moral, and ideological fights brewing around changing animal (and plant) names. You can change the common name, but you wouldn’t be allowed to change the scientific name, so you couldn’t completely expunge Audubon. This becomes problematic in a case like Audubon’s warbler, whose scientific name is Setophaga auduboni, in which both the common and scientific names are eponyms. ![]() But you can’t change the scientific name (which doesn’t contain Audubon’s name), because the official body that assigns scientific names won’t let you. For example, “ Audubon’s oriole” is the common name of a bird species, but its scientific name is Icterus graduacauda. So if you want to change the common name because (as one scientist notes), Audubon was “a bit of a monster”, I don’t much care. (Most of this drive has involved bird names.) In general I’m not a huge fan of changing common names, but I don’t care nearly as much about changing common names as I do about changing scientific names, also known as Latin binomials. Use the search feature of the table (In Red Box Below) to quickly find the Required level.I’ve written several times about the current drive to rename plant and animal species, usually on the grounds that their common or scientific names reflect somebody in the past who did something bad, like owning slaves.
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