The Fruit Fly Drosophila Gets a New Name 136
Posted
by
timothy
from the hope-you-used-pencil dept.
from the hope-you-used-pencil dept.
G3ckoG33k writes "The name of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster will change to Sophophora melangaster. The reason is that scientists have by now discovered some 2,000 species of the genus and it is becoming unmanageably large. Unfortunately, the 'type species' (the reference point of the genus), Drosophila funebris, is rather unrelated to the D. melanogaster, and ends up in a distant part of the relationship tree. However, geneticists have, according to Google Scholar, more than 300,000 scientific articles describing innumerable aspects of the species, and will have to learn the new name as well as remember the old. As expected, the name change has created an emotional (and practical) stir all over media. While name changes are frequent in science, as they describe new knowledge about relationships between species, these changes rarely hit economically relevant species, and when they do, people get upset."
It's not Sophophora yet (Score:5, Informative)
This is why we have common names (Score:2, Informative)
As long as they're still known as fruit flies, changing the scientific name shouldn't cause too much confusion. Anybody who really needs to know will easily pick up on the fact that there are two scientific names and eventually the old name will become archaic.
Re:No surprise (Score:2, Informative)
Well the decision was not about Pluto, but over the definition of a planet. My lecturers told me the committee (or whatever) tried to push a definition that was fuzzy and would have made many now dwarf planets, planets. In a vote, the "people" as he referred to the astronomers, won and now we have a good definition of a planet.
Face it: We could never have 9 planets now. It would be 15 and rising (= a mess) or 8 forever.
Why should 1 body of 4 bodies of roughly equal size rotating around each other make the biggest one a planet?
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No surprise (Score:3, Informative)
Time flies when you're having fun. Fruit flies like a banana.
--
BMO
Re:Lyrical summary (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No surprise (Score:3, Informative)
Because when you think about it, the Meter is just as arbitrary as defining Pluto mass objects as the minimum size for planets.
Go ahead, look up the history of the Meter.
--
BMO
Re:Lyrical summary (Score:1, Informative)
and even that attribution is incorrect, because The Four Lads were just the first to record it. It was actually written by Jimmy Kennedy, with music by Nat Simon. Poor Jimmy Kennedy can't get no respect.
Re:Apatosaurus? Bah! (Score:1, Informative)
Which half? Seriously. It was the wrong skull on the wrong body, and both parts already had older names applied to them separately. Effectively, Brontosaurus never really existed except as a paleontological chimera [wikipedia.org].
Re:No surprise (Score:1, Informative)
But bananas can't fly.