The Fruit Fly Drosophila Gets a New Name 136
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."
Re:No surprise (Score:1, Insightful)
A rose by any other name will still smell as sweet and a drosophila melanogaster by any other name will still like a banana.
Re:No surprise (Score:2, Insightful)
And you are using a bad example because you appear to be completely unaware that the reclassification of Pluto was because of a political pissing contest at the IAU.
You know how legislatures approve unpopular bills in the dead of night on a Friday at the end of the session? That's exactly what happened there. But not only that, they waited for most attendees to go home. Scientifically minded people like me were aghast at the shenanigans.
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BMO
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Last things first:
All multiple bodies rotate around a center of mass that is never in the center of the largest body, be it the Earth-Moon system, or the Jupiter system.
Your 4 body problem is not even rejected as per the definition, so it's a red herring.
Number of planets? Since when does that matter? Where is the maximum number of planets in the definition?
The "people" voted? Seriously? You're seriously saying this? Out of 2700 attendees, all but 5 percent had left by the time the vote came up. Never mind that the membership of the IAU that actually attends the congresses is a small minority.
You know what might have made sense? Making Eris the 10th planet. All other KBO/TNOs are smaller than both Pluto and Eris. Using Pluto's mass as the minimum mass for classification would have solved the problem of "infinite" KBOs being classified as planets.
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BMO
Re:Backwards compatibility (Score:4, Insightful)
Drosophilia melanogaster nomenclature 1.0 was conceived in the 1930's by Johann Wilhelm Meigen.
Drosophilia melanogaster 2.0, for use in genetic science, was developed by Charles W. Woodworth and Thomas Hunt Morgan.
Fruit Fly 3.0, Sophophora melanogaster, (note the summary is missing an o, a syntax error), is a major and backwards-incompatible release after a long period of testing.
Some features have been backported to Fruit Fly 2.6, which is a different fly from the Tephritidae family that poses economic crop problems in Australia.
Works Cited:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drosophila_melanogaster [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language) [wikipedia.org]
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/04/10/0519202 [slashdot.org]
Re:No surprise (Score:1, Insightful)
One definition that I had heard thrown around is to define a planet as any object that has enough mass that it forms a sphericial shape (this was on nova). Why use pljuto as the minimum mass? That's fairly arbritrary. Ceres shoudl be a planet and its no where near being a KBO
Re:Sounds unworkable to me (Score:3, Insightful)
It wasn't the the number of species in the genus that prompted this. It was the genetic analysis of those species that revealed that they were not as closely related as people thought.
Re:No surprise (Score:3, Insightful)
Using Pluto's mass as the minimum mass for classification would have solved the problem of "infinite" KBOs being classified as planets.
Why? It's arbitrary. It's right up there with making a unit of measurement based upon the length of some King's lower appendage. Frankly, I thought we were attempting to move past that with things like the metric system.
Re:Not Sophophora melangaster (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No surprise (Score:3, Insightful)
Eris is larger than Pluto, so your solution doesn't solve the problem the GP was asking about.
Re:No surprise (Score:3, Insightful)
From a biologist's point of view, one kind of fruit fly is (broadly speaking) pretty much the same as the next.
This is one of the most breathtakingly wrong statements I think I've ever read on Slashdot. And that's quite a trick to pull off. Um, congratulations, I guess.