Should offensive species names be changed? The organisms that honour dictators, racists and criminals
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We interact with everything. One of the things that I think that humans really do is we categorize things because it puts our world into smaller chunks.

that we can both understand but also talk about. Because if you can imagine a world without names to call things, how would you ever communicate? Categorising things is central to science.

And there are dozens of systems scientists have created to name everything from the trenches on the seabed to the stars in the sky. But names do more than just help us categorise things. They also reflect the people that name them and they inescapably affect how folk interact with things, species and objects.

And names have consequences. When you say names have power, that's quite true. I would say it's quite a bizarre story. It constantly pops out as a case of inappropriate naming. I will never not struggle with why that is so confusing for some other people. Where it's just like, oh, well, it's just a name. Naming is one of the most powerful things that you can ever do.

I'm Benjamin Thompson and in this series we're going to explore naming in science. How it's done, its consequences, its problems and what, if any, the solutions might be. After all, what's in a name? Over the next three episodes we'll be looking at how the naming strategies of things like storms and viral variants can help to quickly convey important information to the public.

and how the historical naming of physics phenomena literally shifted the direction of research. In this episode though, species. We are now approaching Roughton Road. -Henry, good morning. -Benjamin, dear boy. -Right on time. How are you doing? -Well, you're very early. It's a windy old day. My goodness. I'll jump in if that's OK.

I started by visiting my colleague Henry in the town of Cromer on the Norfolk coast here in the UK. So I've been working on this series called What's in a Name? And we've got one episode about the naming of species, which, I mean, I think it's not unfair to say it's perhaps one of the most complicated things in the known universe. It's also quite contentious at the moment.

My name is Henry Gee, so they tell me, and I am a senior editor at Nature. I've been there for 35 years, maybe 36, and I handle sex and death, so that's paleontology and evolution biology.

Hey, how are you doing? Henry and I popped along to a local museum to look at some fossils. I'm just looking at those bones. I know. What are they? This is an ankle bone of a deer. This is a bison, probably. Yeah, any ideas what that might be in Latin? Bison priscus. Is it?

We are absolutely surrounded by Latin here, Henry. We've got Megalosaurus Savinii Capriolus. Savinii, that's the Sabin, named after Alfred Sabin, the chroma collector. We've got these Latin names, we've also got the common names as well, but Latin, it's so important to science, the naming things. Yes, I mean, here we've got, what's that? It's a great big elephant tooth, and you can tell it's an elephant tooth. But which elephant is it? And it says Southern Mammoth Nazarene.

Now, that doesn't mean anything to me, but Mammuthus meridionalis does, and it would mean the same to a lot of people interested in evolution and the evolution of elephants. So Mammuthus meridionalis could be called the southern mammoth, it could be called anything you like, but it's different from Mammuthus trogontheri, which is like the West Mountain elephant, which is different from Mammuthus primigenius, which is the good old woolly mammoth. They're all different species and they all lived at different times.

We could all call them mammoths or elephants, but these things are confusing and interchangeable when you want to know which mammoth, which elephant, to which one are you referring. So when you use the Latin name, you can be sure you know what you're talking about. So scientists of whatever language, living wherever in the world they are, know exactly what they mean when they're referring to a thing.

I mean, you're an editor at Nature, and obviously you get a lot of papers to do with species across your desk. How many Latin names do you think you've seen in your career? Well, I don't know, but the rules about Latin have loosened. It used to be, back in the day, long before I was a Nature editor, that the names had to be derived from Latin and Greek. Then it was loosened, so they didn't have to be derived from Latin and Greek, but they had to have Latin and Greek endings, so it would be Echinoidus,

Ben Thompson eye and it had to be the appropriate masculine or feminine ending or if it was named after the Thompson family it would be Thompson-aurum but now I think even that's gone out of the window so you can use any language provided it's etymologically correct in the language there's a tiny tiny tiny group of dinosaurs they were like little tree climbing dinosaurs with leathery wings strange bat like things they could have danced in the palm of your hand

And they were called scansoriopterygids, which is basically classically derived. It means things that climb trees that had wings. And there were two of them, one called epidendrosaurus and another called epidexipteryx. And all these are classical things. Well, I have a friend called Xu Xing, who's a Chinese paleontologist, and he's probably named more species of dinosaur than anyone in the history of the world ever.

and he found another one and he thought these things ought to have names that reflect their size. He called it Yi Qi. Y-I-Q-I. Yi Qi. It's the tiniest dinosaur with the tiniest name. After the museum, Henry and I took a trip to the seaside where we started trying to identify plants using a phone app I'd recently downloaded. Hey look, the sun's coming. Yeah. Is the sea down that way? Oh yeah, the sea is over there. Oh look, a rainbow, look. So it is.

Well, here's a flower. Maybe you can try that. Let's have a look. What have we got here? Asteracea? Yeah, it's part of the Asteracea family. And you can tell that from the way the flower is constructed. It's actually a conglomeration of lots and lots and lots of tiny flowers. Well, I can see what its common name is as well. Here we go.

Coltsfoot. Coltsfoot, yeah. I think you were talking about the difference between common names and Latin names and how one is potentially more useful than the other. I mean, Coltsfoot, I think somebody who goes out and about in England would know what a Coltsfoot would look like, but not necessarily with the Latin name. But if you were trying to compare flowers like that from different parts of the world among people who'd never met, what you'd need is the Latin name and then everyone would know what they're talking about.

Henry makes the point that this consistency is vital for scientists. But it doesn't stop there. It can have real-world consequences and is vital in things like conservation and public health.

For example, in the early 1990s, over a hundred people in Belgium were hospitalised and some even died after taking slimming pills, owing to a mix-up between two plant extracts with similar sounding common names. One was poisonous, the other not. But the system of naming species has a long and complicated history.

In fact, it is over 250 years old and it began with Carl Linnaeus, who, according to a 2014 analysis of Wikipedia links by a team of researchers, was ranked as the most influential person on the site, beating out Aristotle and even Jesus.

I'm Sandy Knapp and I'm a botanist at the Natural History Museum, best place to work in the world. Sandy researches the nightshade family, figuring out what the species are, giving names to them and looking at how they're related.

She was also a president of the Linnaean Society. Oh man, Linnaeus was really confident. I mean, he was an extraordinary young Swedish son of a parson. And for Linnaeus, being a good botanist was knowing all the names of all the plants. I mean, we can't imagine that today. And even though only a tiny fraction of the number of plants we know today had been identified, remembering them all was easier said than done. At that time, in the early part of the 1700s,

Plants and animals, but plants more so, were given long names that were like sentences, and it was all in Latin. So that you would say, this is the gentian that has big blue flowers with very short stems that grows in the Alps, for example. That meant if you discovered another gentian that was quite similar, the name of that first gentian had to change.

because you had to distinguish the two of them in some kind of way. So these names were getting longer and longer, these polynomials, which means many words, right? So Linnaeus came up with a shorthand. He came up with a way of having the genus, which is that first word in this polynomial, so it's the noun,

And he came up with a way of putting a single word in the margins, which is essentially kind of like the noun-adjective system that most languages use. And he called those the trivial names. And all they were for was to help people remember. So they were a mnemonic. But Linnaeus' system wasn't the only game in town. There were other folk proposing alternate systems, which, for various reasons...

didn't catch on. My favourite one of all is one from Jean Bergeret, which is sort of the late 1700s. And he had a system for plants. Each plant had a set of 15 characteristics that you would use to define it. And each of those characteristics had a letter that corresponded to that particular characteristic. So the plant, which we call the deadly nightshade, Atropa belladonna, his name for that was something like JXQ-A.

W-V-T-S-Q-R, whatever, whatever, whatever. Which, of course, how could you even say that, much less remember it? And perhaps this was the reason it was the Linnaean system that ultimately persisted. People assume that Linnaeus imposed this on the world, but it wasn't imposed. It was something that just...

was a super good idea and caught on. That's not to say all of his ideas caught on. Things like a sexual system to organise flowering plants into groups depending on the number of their male and female parts. Or a method of categorising people by race. But his way of naming species, this personal shorthand now called binomial nomenclature, became all-pervasive.

However, just having a two-name system wasn't enough. What was happening is that someone would name something and then someone else would go, I don't like that name, I'm going to change it to that name, or no, I'm going to call it this here, and names were being coined willy-nilly and there were no rules for which one you should use. So it became this complicated system, a bit like common names in different languages, that there's a different one for everywhere. But the first person to codify a code of nomenclature in botany was Alphonse de Candolle.

that wrote "Les Lois de la Nomenclature Botanique". I can't remember when it was, 1907? It was 1905. So it was a long time that there was no kind of code of nomenclature. Around two million species currently have a binomial name, and systems for naming them were codified into similar but different rules for animals, plants and the various types of microorganism. These names contain two parts: genus and species.

This system of naming is the nomenclature system and it goes hand in hand with taxonomy and systematics, involved in the classifying of species, figuring out how they are related to each other and where they fit on the tree of life. Binomial names help standardise academic communication, ensuring that scientists are on the same page when they talk about an organism.

But standardisation requires more than just a standard format or the consistent use of Latin and a bit of Ancient Greek. In fact, it is a lot more complicated than that. There are rules, a lot of rules, about who gets to name something and what they get to name it. And researchers need to do a lot of work before they even get to the naming stage.

So, let's say that we have discovered an animal and we think it's a new species. Let's make it a moniker with the help of Darren Naish. Darren Naish, N-A-I-S-H. Darren is the A-R-R-E-N. I'm affiliated with the University of Southampton. I mostly work as a consultant for natural history filmmaking. We are going to walk through the process of naming a new species. And there are a lot of potential points of failure. But

Let's start at the start. Step one: is our animal actually a new species? Being first is fundamentally important in species naming. In the vast majority of cases, the first published name takes precedence over any others. It's called the law of priority. We're talking about a process of scientific discovery and hypothesis testing, but ultimately the main name of the game

is publication. You've got to do a lot of work, which involves the literature. I have to check to see that someone hasn't named it before. So we need to hit the books and hope that no one has beaten us to it.

There's literally thousands of cases where people have missed the fact that their probable new species was described before. It turns out that, oh, we forgot or we didn't know that some relatively obscure scientists had named the exact same thing, you know, back in 1824 or whatever. However, in this instance, let's assume we haven't found anything and it looks like our specimen hasn't been described already. Time to hit the collections.

Kind of hand in hand with checking of the literature is the use of museums.

If you're pretty sure you've got something new, we have to go and check it with actual physical specimens for specific features. And this can take absolutely years and years and years. With no guarantee of success that the specimen you have is new to science. And of course people can put in loads of effort and find out, no, it's not. It turns out that we thought that species was yellow, but that's because all the species in museums have been degraded in the preservative they were kept in. And the one we've got in our hand...

that's blue, turns out same species, you know, that kind of thing can happen. But let's say we don't find anything in our search through the dusty drawers. Well, now it's time to hit the lab. In the molecular age, increasingly we think that we shouldn't rely just on anatomical traits because we know for a whole list of reasons they can be labile, they can change. We also now have all these molecular tools that are increasingly accessible to people worldwide.

So you should use anatomy to prop up the validity of your possible new species, but you should use genetics as well. And again, this is another thing where you might actually stumble and it might not work out. So there are several hurdles to overcome to get to this point. But for some, there are even more.

For example, not every researcher is in the privileged position of being able to easily visit a large library and peer through their old periodicals, or go to the museums where the specimens are kept. And speaking of specimens, there's another wrinkle.

The convention is that in order to describe a new animal species, you need to donate an example, called a type specimen, to one of the collections we heard about. And a specimen has to be dead before it's donated. Maybe easy enough for, say, a beetle, but… When it comes to something like, "I've found a new species of monkey," you could

quite easily come up against opposition within the research community that you shouldn't have killed that animal, especially when we might be talking about an animal where there's less than 100 of them. That can be seen in some research communities as a really controversial and even as a bad thing to do. There are a lot of opinions on this, with some folks saying no type specimen, no new species.

However, in a scant few cases, a photograph of a new species has been added to the records. But it's a controversial practice. Regardless, we're sidestepping all that with our hypothetical animal. We're happy it's a new species and we're ready to tell the world. Step two: publish. So we write a description that says this is the backstory while doing fieldwork in region X at time X

this team of people, including myself, we've discovered what we think is a new species, then the naming of it. Now, the naming of it is generally put near the start in the paper. Mostly these are published in peer-reviewed journals. And there is the chance that the reviewers won't agree with your findings. Some people flout this and get around it by publishing in non-peer-reviewed journals. And there have been cases where folk have even started up their own.

Again, it comes back to this fundamental law of priority. If you've published it first, you've named it. And some folk will go to serious, and it could be argued, flawed lengths to make sure they do. Anyway, the paper you publish contains the name you want to give the species. You can't just call it anything you want, though. The name that you propose is, according to the rules, not allowed to be offensive.

You're not allowed to name it after yourself. The name is meant to be euphonious. It's meant to be pronounceable. And that is kind of subjective. Not just super technical names like Apistocelicordia, Skazinski, whatever. There's names that are random combinations of letters. I believe there's an orthopteran, so a grasshopper-type insect called Zizizidix, which is a random combination of Xs and Ys.

We've been talking a lot about rules, but in reality some of these are more like guidelines. The International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, the ICZN, is the body that regulates the naming of animal species.

In the non-binding ethics section of their most recent code, it states: "Authors should exercise reasonable care and consideration in forming new names to ensure that they are chosen with their subsequent users in mind, and that as far as possible they are appropriate, compact, euphonious, memorable, and do not cause offence." And things like "appropriate" and "do not cause offence" are subjective.

Is it appropriate to name a species after a member of a heavy metal band? Weirdly, there are a lot of those. Or a divisive politician, or an actor, or so on. And that can be problematic. However, if you go back to the days before these recommendations were published, there were a lot of names that definitely wouldn't fit.

Slovenia is a small nation in southern central Europe. One of the things the country is known for is the amount of caves it's got. There's over 14,000 of them. But in just a handful of cave systems, there lives a tiny and unremarkable beetle. Definitely nothing special.

So my name is Theo Delic. I'm a researcher at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. Theo has been down in the caves and seen these diminutive animals up close. So it's a small, up to approximately six, seven millimeters big, amber-colored beetle without eyes. That's something that you could see on the first glance.

These insects don't make any exciting pigments or even need to be able to see because they live in total darkness where they survive by eating even smaller invertebrates. And yet, despite them not being particularly exciting, this beetle does have one thing that has resulted in it getting a lot of unwanted attention: its name. So the name of the beetle is Anophthalmus hitleri. Anophthalmus hitleri. Yep.

after the murderous Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. So Vladimir Kodrich, who was an amateur entomologist from Slovenia, caught the specimen, I think in late 32 or something like that. And then in 1933, he gave it to Oskar Schiebel, who was a German working in Zagreb at the time in Croatia.

and she will immediately saw that it would be a new species

And he also promised to Kodrich that he will name it after him. So it should be Anophthalmus kodrichi. But then when Adolf Hitler became the chancellor, he named it after Hitler. And soon after that, Hitler sent him back his gratitude for naming the species after him. And this appears to have made things tough for this tiny insect. With sad inevitability, there's a trade in things related to the Führer.

It's been reported that the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology had almost all of its specimens stolen for that reason, and there's even some suggestions that poachers could threaten this species' very existence. Theos sinned traps in the caves where these beetles live, but says it's impossible to know whether they were for Anophthalmus hitleri or some of the even rarer beetles that lived there.

He also says he's never seen them for sale in insect markets, but concedes that much like the beetle's lifestyle, the trade in Hitler-related memorabilia is likely to be underground. Regardless, a simple twist of fate could have made things very different. If it was called Anophtalmus kodrichi, I'm completely sure that nobody would care about this beetle. It was the wrong beetle in the wrong time in the wrong place.

And that's the thing about names. They have consequences, unintended or otherwise. And naming a species after a person, like Anophthalmus hitleri, is something that's receiving a lot of attention at the moment. There have been many, many species named after people, known as eponyms. It's a practice that dates back hundreds of years. Linnaeus himself coined some.

In many cases throughout history, eponyms have been used to honour significant or influential figures like royalty or benefactors who funded research or expeditionary trips. But with time comes a clearer lens on the actions of a number of these people. And now, many researchers find the use of eponymous names distasteful. This has resulted in a pushback against eponymous species naming and a call for change.

For example, last year a comment article was published in the journal Nature, Ecology and Evolution with the title: "Eponyms have no place in 21st century biological nomenclature". One of the authors of the article was Ricardo Rocha. It's Ricardo Rocha, University of Oxford, Department of Biology. So that's the English pronunciation. The Portuguese pronunciation would be Ricardo Rocha.

So the reason that led to the paper that we published was that in around 2020, I came across this piece in Portuguese news saying that six different species of African vertebrates had recently been described by Portuguese researchers. And I came to realize that five of those species were honoring people. So their scientific name was eponyms.

And of those, at least four were associated with Portuguese either researchers or expedition leaders. And it just felt very misplaced in a way that these species that were endemic to these localities in Africa were still being associated with the name of Portuguese researchers. So it did not feel correct.

So yeah, we started speaking more broadly about this and this led to the wider research. And the team found that this imbalance was widespread across the continent. We analyzed the scientific names of the vertebrates that have a distribution that is restricted to Africa.

And of those, around 25% had names that were associated with people, eponyms. And of those, the large majority were associated with the main colonial powers. So the UK, France, Portugal, Germany to a lesser extent, Belgium and so on. And this is by no means the only study coming to conclusions like this.

A paper looking at plant species on the French overseas territory of New Caledonia, a group of islands in the Pacific Ocean, showed that the majority of eponymous names came from France or other European countries. For Ricardo, these eponyms could have multiple consequences.

But eponymous names also have a

a direct impact at an individual level. My name is Erin McGee and I'm the creator of hashtag find that lizard. I'm a science communicator and herpetologist. Erin studied a lizard called Scalloporus yarivai, also known as yarrow spiny lizard, named after H.C. Yarrow, an ornithologist and herpetologist and a union surgeon during the U.S. Civil War.

Yarrow stole indigenous remains and sold them to museums. It's the first lizard that I ever got to work with. It's one that I credit with putting me down on the path to kind of figuring out what I want to do. And so it's just kind of like that duality of being in this field that I love and having already known that, you know, there is this negative history to it, but then also just like

I guess not being able to escape that. And even in its smallest form, the name of a lizard that I got to work with. And I will never not struggle with why not.

That is so confusing for some other people where it's just like, oh, well, it's just the name and they did this great thing or whatever. And we still have to acknowledge their genius or that type of thing. And I think that that's where I get stuck is, sure, they did this, but at what cost?

and not just the cost to people now, but the cost to people then. - I asked Erin what she, as a black woman, thought the first time she heard about the history associated with the lizard's name.

disappointment a little bit of frustration because sometimes it's like no matter where you go you run into some kind of racist history and that can definitely be really frustrating when you're going into nature and it's just like you feel like this is like the one place where those things shouldn't touch but they do

There is a growing movement to change eponyms, especially problematic ones, both for common names and species names, and stop their use moving forward. Now, for common names that is relatively achievable, although by no means easy. There are no rules associated with common names, and although some have existed for a very long time, there are examples where it has been successfully done, changing names containing ethnic or racist slurs.

That is true in some cases for eponymous names too. Take for example the thick-billed longspur, a bird that lives on the plains of the central United States. Until recently it was known as McCowan's longspur, after the Confederate general John P. McCowan. After a lot of discussion and debate it was changed.

And last year, the American Ornithological Society announced plans to change all eponymous English bird names. But it hasn't been that simple. Following pushback from some to this broad approach, the American Ornithological Society has scaled back its plans and instead launched a pilot project initially focusing on the names of six birds. But even though common names might change, binomials will still remain.

The thick-billed longspur, for example, is still Rhynchophaenes mccownii. And that is something that's a lot more difficult to change. And this isn't an isolated case. In fact, many researchers are resistant to removing eponyms, for a variety of reasons. When Ricardo Rocha and his colleagues published their article calling for the removal of all eponymous species names, they were deluged with responses.

There were hundreds of comments on the site ResearchGate and a multitude of written responses published in different journals. For Ricardo, reading some of these changed his perspective.

Many of those present really valid arguments to retaining eponyms. Some support our view, but still, what comes across is that there's need for debate and there's need to caution in using people's names to name species. So I think that a complete ban, as we call it, is a bit too extreme. But nonetheless, the way that it's being used needs a bit more consideration.

The fact is, some researchers say there are benefits to eponymous naming. Here in Latin America, the consensus with other researchers is that eponymous are useful for us not only for recognition of cultural actors and everything, but also as a tool for conservation. This is Carolina Reyes Puig from Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador, who works on the taxonomy of reptiles and lizards. Yes, Carolina Reyes Puig, Universidad San Francisco de Quito.

So naming a species after donors or after people that are really, really, really interested in conservation also is important for us as a tool because we can get some funds for conserve or protect where the species inhabit, but also the region.

And income can make a big difference in biodiverse areas facing multiple pressures. So we have a lot of regions in the Andes that are really, really threatened by mining, by deforestation and also by climate change. And ironically, these areas are also the richness in species. So for us and for our reality, eponyms are really, really useful.

In 2023, Carolina and her colleagues described a new species of lizard, giving it an eponymous name Selvasaura mamadoulae, after Dolores Coquengo, also known as Mamadoulu, who fought for the rights of indigenous people in Ecuador in the mid-20th century. She was known for being a rebellious and self-taught indigenous woman that was founder of the Ecuadorian Federation of Indigenous

And she always defended the importance of bilingual education, so Spanish but also Quechua.

So, she was a woman really important for our history, but also for the indigenous people. Carolina says that this name also helped garner media attention for an animal whose habitat is under threat. One important thing to spread was the importance of biodiversity here in Ecuador, but also information about endemic species. So, Selvasaura mamadoulae are distributed really near from mining concessions.

And this is a really threat for the populations, but also the other micro vertebrates that inhabit this area. Carolina and others say that eponymous names are of great use to researchers in the global south, but that many calls to end their use are coming from the global north. Eponyms have often been used to honour funders and patrons, benefits that she feels might be denied to researchers if their use is prohibited. But how likely is that?

As we've heard, there are a lot of opinions on the use of eponyms, with some researchers calling for a total removal, both historically and moving forward. Others disagreeing, and some in the middle, saying that there's a balance to be struck, with some obviously offensive names stricken from the record, but others left alone.

At the start of 2023, members of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, the ICZN, responsible for the rules governing animal species naming, co-wrote an article in the Zoological Journal of the Linnaean Society, arguing that "Replacing accepted scientific names because of perceived offensiveness is not and should not be regulated by the Code."

Although the Commission recognises that some scientific names might cause discomfort or offence to parts of the community, such as eponyms of dictators or historical figures considered by some as racists, or because a word currently has negative connotations, the commitment to a stable and universal nomenclature remains the priority.

This position drew a lot of responses, with some researchers writing articles in the journal later in the year saying things like: "The biological sciences are inextricably a part of society.

As such, it is important to understand that biology, including the associated field of zoological nomenclature, where scientific names are attached to animals, should not operate in a vacuum completely independent of societal norms. The biological sciences, in their broadest definition, like most things in life, need to evolve, pun intended, with the changes, including those in society, or run the risk of going extinct.

The dilemma now faced by taxonomists is to choose between historical justice/equity versus priority of names honouring imperial colonialists.

However, not everyone agrees with this. For example, one researcher wrote on their blog: "Once we step onto the slippery slope of expunging offensive names, it immediately becomes difficult to draw a clear line, to decide whose feelings count and just how offensive a name must be to deserve replacement. So long as names are formed according to the rules, they enter the annals of nomenclature."

And this belief that rules are rules and that names should stick is shared by a lot of researchers, with some making the point that in many cases, even if a name is changed, it never really goes away. There's the official name of a species, and any others it may have collected are called synonyms, which aren't used day to day, but are still on record and referred to in the scientific literature.

However, perhaps the main reason that comes up time and again against the renaming of species is the need to maintain stability in the taxonomic system, and that if names are changed, it could threaten things like standard communication between researchers, the very thing this naming system was set up to address in the first place.

In a Nature News article this year, Thomas Parper, the current ICZN president, said that the ICZN is firmly against going back and renaming species whose names might now be considered offensive, and that: "We do not recommend renaming unless there are what we would call formal nomenclatural reasons." These reasons could include that an older description of a species is found,

and, as per the law of priority, that one is now the first, so it becomes the official name, with the other one slipping into synonymy. There are other reasons that names might change too. For example, if new genetic information reveals that a species needs to be moved on the tree of life, and its name needs to be altered to reflect that.

So, if names do change for those reasons, folk have asked why not allow them to be changed for others, like them being considered offensive.

One pushback against this is that, well, there's just too many of them, and retrospectively removing eponyms would just be too difficult. This isn't an argument that Erin McGee, the herpetologist you heard from earlier, can get behind. If you literally change the name everywhere, then what difference has it made that it's not one thing or another? Eventually, people are going to adapt because names change all the time.

You know, it's probably hard. Is it hard or is it tedious? Just all the steps you got to go through to change the name. But probably the hardest part is all the pushback. You can find a way. We can change some rules. There could be a new edict passed down saying if the name is problematic, we're going to change it. And this is how those changes will be made in these specialty cases. Something like that could happen.

And changing the rules is something that's happening, to some extent at least, for one group of organisms: plants. At this year's International Botanical Congress in Madrid, delegates voted on a proposal to change the names of a large number of plants, fungi and algae that contain a racial slur used against black people and others, mostly in southern Africa. The proposal passed after 63% voted in favour, with the changes coming into effect after the Congress.

One of the proposers was quoted saying: "We, throughout, had faith in the process and the majority global support of our colleagues, even though the outcome of the vote was always going to be close." And that's not all. A committee is to be set up that can flag up problematic species names for future Congresses to decide on. However, this committee will only consider names given after 2026, not historical ones.

The original proposal to form a committee to look at all names was amended before voting. Kevin Teely, who put forward the original proposal, was philosophical about the outcome, quoted as saying: "At least it's a sliver of recognition of the issue." Whether this start ultimately develops to look at historic names as well, and whether the world of animal naming will one day follow suit, are currently unknown.

But all of this discussion is centred around whether or not names, historic or otherwise, should be changed. But even if we find ourselves in a situation where names deemed to be offensive can be changed, there is another big question. What should they be changed to?

It's a really tricky one. Who gets to choose? So who is willing to do the work? That's the first thing. And how can we make that group of people the most diverse possible? So you have some particular species in particular regions, and I think that that region should have their own taxonomists. I think that it's good that the people that are invested in taxonomy and describing species have the freedom to name the species, but

But the end user needs to be considered as well. And then even after then, once they pick, you need to treat it like a book. Find you a sensitivity reader or a few sensitivity readers. Pull people from the public and just be like, hey, this is where we're coming from. This is what we got. How does this seem to you? There are many, many ideas and opinions about what to do. So how do we make our way through the quagmire of possibilities?

Well, one seemingly straightforward answer to that is to look to the past and take a leaf out of the old polynomial book. Remember this? This is the gentian that has big blue flowers with very short stems that grows in the Alps. Now, I don't mean that science should go back to using full polynomials, but maybe new binomial names could just describe the organism itself. Red-legged, yellow-chested, whatever.

It seems fairly sensible, and there's the argument that these are more descriptive and therefore more useful than someone's name. On the flip side, however, organisms can look different if they're male or female, old or young, and there's potentially a lot of them with those features, and so they might appear in multiple cases. But then some people have multiple species named after them too. Darwin has hundreds, for example. So what other options are there?

Well, what if we think about something else that already exists? The law of priority. This fundamental principle that the first name of a species is the name. Of course, many species had names long before scientists, in heavy inverted commas, discovered them.

We envisage taxonomic rule changes to promote retrospective name changes that establish, on the basis of precedence, pre-existing indigenous names for species where possible. This is a quote from a 2020 Communications Biology paper written by two researchers in New Zealand, or Aotearoa as it's called in Māori, calling for indigenous names to be used wherever possible when naming species.

I wasn't able to talk with the authors for this podcast, but even this approach isn't without its pitfalls. After all, not every species has a local name, and in some cases an animal or plant could be found in an area where there are multiple indigenous languages. So which one would you choose? These are the sorts of things that will need to be debated. And if this is the avenue that researchers want to go down, it's important that they do it well.

To find out how this could be done, I reached out to Hemi Whanga. I'm Hemi Whanga from Massey University in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Hemi is a linguist who researches the digital preservation of Māori language and culture.

He says he has seen many examples where well-meaning researchers have tried to incorporate Māori into species names, but the results haven't been good. I've seen many cases where they go to the dictionary and say, "Oh, that's it. We'll just take this word, this word and jam it together like working on its appearance." And so you end up with things like, "It's got big eyes, so we'll just call it 'big eyes' - nui mata - and then they've got it backwards."

Because big eyes in Māori is done the other way around, matanui. And then the name is stuck and you sit there going, well, that doesn't make sense at all. And it's not just linguistics that can be used incorrectly.

There can be cultural missteps too. They want to respect the place that they visited, for example, and will take out names from localities where their species were found. And a lot of times those landscapes are named after important historical events, after important leaders of the time. So you're giving a name to a species which might have a name named after a chief.

without any recognition of that historical context in which that name was derived from. Even here, eponyms can raise their head once again. As a Māori, Hemi says he's been asked by researchers to help in the naming of species, requests that he's turned down.

He says he's personally not against Māori being incorporated, and there are examples where it's been done well, which have happened thanks to dialogue with the wider community. According to the article I quoted earlier calling for indigenous names to be restored: "The first step in this process should be a general debate on the merits, or otherwise, of a new approach. This debate must include indigenous peoples and indigenous scientists as prominent stakeholders in the discussion.

And I suppose that's one of the really important things when scientists are working with indigenous community. It's about anything is that you have to build a relationship in order to that knowledge to go back and forth, you know, that scientific knowledge into your community as indigenous people and our knowledge back into the science community. That trust relationship needs to be built and trust around naming too, that you are going to

provide a name that is reflective of the importance of whether it be a place, a tribal name, its appearance. You might not think that this beetle is super important, but it might be a guardian for someone. It might be a food source. It might be depicted in artwork. You just don't know unless you ask.

And that is the most difficult thing to accomplish, is finding the correct people within that language community and the indigenous community to talk to. Hemmy says that respect is a key word and that there might be occasions where indigenous communities ask that a name is not used, as the act of naming can, to some, imply ownership. If you name it, you're related to it. So this word of caution around naming things with indigenous languages

They might say, absolutely not. It's a science domain and we don't want to have any part of that colonial process. We don't want our names or our ancestors being disrespected. You've got to respect that there are different, I suppose, positions in which people want to express their own autonomy, their own sovereignty over their language.

And there are other positions where people are quite comfortable to provide a particular method which allows others kind of insight to their own way that they see things. Naming is one of the most powerful things that you can ever do. One of the most powerful things you can ever do. As we've heard throughout this episode, naming a species is also an act that's become fraught with controversy, particularly in recent times.

Binomial names have existed for the last 250 odd years, but how and if their use evolves is unclear. Species naming is intrinsically tied to taxonomy and working out the relationships between species. There are many that argue that rigidity is central to this endeavour. Upending it by changing names could be catastrophic for a field that doesn't receive much recognition. Here's Carolina.

Taxonomy is a science that currently is really underrated and underestimated. And people used to think that it's quite simple and it's not so easy. And taxonomy is really, really important for our countries where biodiversity is really high. And much of this biodiversity is threatened, but also is not described yet. So it's an important thing to do.

However, there are an increasing number of voices saying that it's time for change, in order for science to remain in step with society, and that many of the old ways belong in the past. Whether it's one or the other, or whether there's a way to thread the needle between the two camps remains to be seen. But whatever happens, it seems like the framework for naming species will exist for a while to come just yet.

I think the key to having the rules is to have something that everybody can use and that applies no matter where and who, so we can all communicate stuff. Because once communication breaks down, we're back to the 17th century. The bottom line is, can we come up with a better system

that allows us to link a label to the organism and so far no one has done that and because we can't or we haven't yet I think we are gonna stick to it

Well, as somebody once said, prediction is very hard, especially about the future. But I will say this, there have been a number of attempts to reform Linnean taxonomy, get rid of Linnean taxonomy. But the funny thing is, it's shown extraordinary resilience because when it comes down to it, when people are at the coalface trying to name 100 species of tiny wasp,

Linear taxonomy is the good, handy, reliable rule of thumb that they use to do it. Episode 1 of What's in a Name was written and produced by me, Benjamin Thompson.

It was produced by me and Noah Baker, who also helped with the editing of the episode. Thanks go to Emma Stoy, Emily Bates, Flora Graham, Richard Van Norton, Nisha Gained, Davide Castelvecchi, Jacob Smith, Emil Case, Anne-Marie Conlon, Joe Roosman, Nick Petrich-Howe, Dan Fox, and S.N. Massoud.

The music was by Premium Audio, Alan Marcus, Groove Committee, Op Kono, Eric McNerney and Earless Pierre via Pond5 and Richard Smithson and Douglas Romaine via Triple Scoop Music. For a full list of references and other credits, head over to the show notes. And look out for episode two early next year. Hey guys.

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