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."
Historical Precedent (Score:1, Interesting)
This ain't just some fruit fly. This is the fruit fly. The one Thomas Hunt Morgan [wikipedia.org] chose to study.
"In his famous Fly Room at Columbia University Morgan was able to demonstrate that genes are carried on chromosomes and are the mechanical basis of heredity."
(wikipedia). Drosophila melanogaster [wikipedia.org] was also the model organism that was used in studies that led to the discovery of hox genes [wikipedia.org]. And before the best and the brightest flash their union card credentials and poo poo the lay people let's not forget similar memorable fiascoes where scientists themselves refused to get on board with sensible taxonomy [wikipedia.org] name changes. For example in immunology the innate immune system has a glitch in it's taxonomy in the naming conventions of the Complement System [wikipedia.org] where cleaved segments have a truculent anti-intuitive name for one of the segments. An effort was made to have the one segment (C2a) renamed but it hasn't been universally adopted just because that's the way it's always been.
And why the 503 error persisting for more than 5 minutes?
mindbrane
stupid dumbshits (Score:1, Interesting)
Drosophila melanogaster is THE species - and the only species - that scientists have simply decided to coalesce around and study in comprehensive detail. It has been the species for studying recessive and dominant genes. It is the first species to have its genome sequenced. Etc etc etc. Scientists simply decided long ago that they will get an economy of scale by pooling their papers around this species. It's a little bit similar to the old pool of resources and knowledge in the "Windows" name.
Microsoft could change or drop the name of just about any of its products - except "Windows".
Likewise you can change the name of any species - even Homo Sapiens - except Drosophila melanogaster.
it is the ONE species that has to keep its name.
Re:Can scientists stop arguing about their names? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No surprise (Score:3, Interesting)
1. All definitions are essentially arbitrary at some point.
2. All the other named KBOs are big enough to be round by gravity
3. If we make Ceres a planet, then we have to make the KBOs planets too.
--
BMO
Apatosaurus? Bah! (Score:3, Interesting)
It's still Brontosaurus to me.
Why should zoology be immune to change? (Score:3, Interesting)
It happens in microbiology a lot. Pastuerella pestis became Yersinia pestis ... Bubonic Plague remained the same, and the old studies are still valid. How hard is it to set up a table of equivalents where Yersinia = Pasteurella
Botany has been systematically reclassifying plants by their genome, moving dozens of species, eliminating others.
Why should zoology be immune to change?
Re:No surprise (Score:3, Interesting)
To hijack your argument:
A useful classification system will group like with like. Earth at .3% of Jupiter's mass is very much unlike Jupiter. When you consider that Mars and Venus are 11% and 82% of the mass of Earth, it's clear that Earth is much more like them than it is like Jupiter.
Yet all are planets.
--
BMO
It HAPPENS ALL THE TIME. No big deal. (Score:3, Interesting)
This is standard operating procedure for systematics and has been for a century or so. It happens all the time. International codes spell out exactly how it all works. Systematists have agreed long ago that this is the way it should be and scientists take it in stride. These scientific names are created and managed to meet specific needs of working scientists. It should be of no more consequence to nonspecialists than changing "cycles per second" to "Hz" or "carbonic acid" to "carbon dioxide" or changes in IUPAC rules.
The horseshoe crab was Limulus polyphemus, then Xiphosura polyphemus, then Limulus polyphemus again.
In 1962 Theodore Savory wrote, in Naming the Living World: "The second belief, apparently held by many, is that a change of name is a serious, almost a catastrophic occurrence, but in everyday life outside the lab this is simply not true; and a biologist may be reminded that both his mother and his wife have survived the same metamorphosis. The third fallacy is that the possession by an organism of two or three [different scientific] names imposes upon biologists that it is beyond their capacities to carry. This could be true only if zoologists, for example, were expected or needed to be familiar with every animal, whereas nearly all active zoologists today are either physiologists, who do not seem to care about nomenclature, or specialists concerned with only one group, large or small but essentially limited."
The scientific names of organisms serve a number of functions. One is to be sure that scientists working worldwide know what organism is being referred to, and avoiding problems with common names such as "daddy long-legs" or "nightingale..." or, for that matter, "fruit fly" which describes at least two different families of insect.
Another is to reflect the systematic relationships of species as best known. As knowledge evolves, names evolve.
Biologists agreed on the best way to handle this long ago. It's not at all analogous to Pluto. There are less than ten planets, and there are over a million species of animals and plants. If you think scientists can get all of them right and never change any of them, think again.
If you write a scientific paper, you have a choice: call it Sophophora melanogaster or Drosophila melanogaster. If you call it Drosophila, likely someone will insist on correcting it, but maybe not. Either way it is not going to be a problem and is not going to cause "chaos in the literature" because everyone who knows the species by its scientific name will know about the change. Nobody is going to get confused. Automated searches will get cross-references just like card catalog did.
And if you're not doing professional science, just go on calling them "fruit flies." Just like "Baltimore orioles."