Is It Time To Rethink Naming of Species? (theguardian.com) 239
An anonymous reader shares an article: In 1937, a brown, eyeless beetle was found in a few caves in Slovenia. The new species was unexceptional apart from one feature. Its discoverer decided to name it after Adolf Hitler. Anophthalmus hitleri has an objectionable sound to modern ears. Nor is it alone. Many species' names recall individuals or ideas that offend: the butterfly Hypopta mussolinii, for example, while several hundred plant species carry names based on the word caffra which is derived from a racial slur once used in Africa. Similarly Hibbertia, a genus of flowering plants, honours George Hibbert, an English slave owner.
As a result, many scientists are pressing for changes to be made to the international system for giving official scientific names to plants and animals to allow the deletion and substitution of past names if they are deemed objectionable. Current taxonomy regulations, which do not allow such changes, must be altered, they say. Other scientists disagree. Arguing over names that some think are unacceptable while searching for alternatives would waste time and create confusion. Species names should remain inviolate once they have been agreed by taxonomists, they argue, and changes should only be allowed if a mistake in designation has been made or an earlier designation is found to have been overlooked.
The row now threatens to become a major international dispute. "People have very, very strong opinions one way or the other about this," said botanist Sandra Knapp, of the Natural History Museum in London. "There's been a certain amount of shouting about it but we have to discuss issues like this. We cannot avoid them." As a result, Knapp has arranged for a discussion before voting on the issue occurs at the next International Botanical Congress, which will be held in Madrid in July 2024. One motion put forward by a group of botanists calls for a committee to be set up with powers to judge whether scientific names for plants that are now considered unacceptable should be suppressed or changed.
As a result, many scientists are pressing for changes to be made to the international system for giving official scientific names to plants and animals to allow the deletion and substitution of past names if they are deemed objectionable. Current taxonomy regulations, which do not allow such changes, must be altered, they say. Other scientists disagree. Arguing over names that some think are unacceptable while searching for alternatives would waste time and create confusion. Species names should remain inviolate once they have been agreed by taxonomists, they argue, and changes should only be allowed if a mistake in designation has been made or an earlier designation is found to have been overlooked.
The row now threatens to become a major international dispute. "People have very, very strong opinions one way or the other about this," said botanist Sandra Knapp, of the Natural History Museum in London. "There's been a certain amount of shouting about it but we have to discuss issues like this. We cannot avoid them." As a result, Knapp has arranged for a discussion before voting on the issue occurs at the next International Botanical Congress, which will be held in Madrid in July 2024. One motion put forward by a group of botanists calls for a committee to be set up with powers to judge whether scientific names for plants that are now considered unacceptable should be suppressed or changed.
More wokeness (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:More wokeness (Score:5, Insightful)
It's ruining everything, including history.
Don't shortchange this action. In many cases, it has destroyed the teaching of history. How the hell can you even teach about Hitler, or how bad communist socialism was for the 100 million citizens who suffered and died under it when it's too fucking triggering for the audience who voted to NOT teach it, because feelings?
It's not merely pathetic. It's dangerous as hell. Bad enough humans are often too stupid to learn from the worst of our history, but it makes it rather easy to make the worst mistakes again when you're not even taught the consequences of it.
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Re:More wokeness (Score:4, Insightful)
Most developed nations are also communist to a degree. They are still unrelated concepts and neither are by definition extremist. For example, roads are socialist (publicly funded for the common good) while the postal service is more of a communist system (government owns the means of production).
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Honestly at this point both terms have been so perverted that they are functionally useless. It wouldn't matter if the terms didn't mean their original meanings anymore (socialism is the term that originally meant worker control of the means of production, communism was understood to mean a stateless, moneyless society of communal agreements) but nobody can even agree what the new definitions are.
If we really want socialism to mean "government does thing" than that's fine but it can no longer be used a ter
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Honestly at this point both terms have been so perverted that they are functionally useless. It wouldn't matter if the terms didn't mean their original meanings anymore (socialism is the term that originally meant worker control of the means of production, communism was understood to mean a stateless, moneyless society of communal agreements) but nobody can even agree what the new definitions are.
If we really want socialism to mean "government does thing" than that's fine but it can no longer be used a term of derision since the government does and always has done things. Even in your examples, the concept of communal and public roads and a centralized courier system for communications predate Marx and those terms by hundreds and thousands of years.
'Communist', 'Marxist', 'Fascist' and 'Nazi' are, today, just pejoratives. Unless you are actually in the context of political science, they mean nothing outside of the insults that they are used as.
Similarly with 'antisemite', theres a wonderful example in an ethnography by Barbara Myerhoff, studying elderly Jews. They were using 'antisemite' as a pejorative against one another, yeah one old Jew calling another 'Antisemite!'
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yeah one old Jew calling another 'Antisemite!'
Having a few Jewish friends growing up and still today they would tell me that this is actually pretty common in their community, especially between the far more secular side and much more religious side.
Or as she put it "all Jews are antisemite's because we're all full of self loathing thanks to our overbearing mothers" (this was in a joking manner to be clear)
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yeah one old Jew calling another 'Antisemite!'
Having a few Jewish friends growing up and still today they would tell me that this is actually pretty common in their community, especially between the far more secular side and much more religious side.
Or as she put it "all Jews are antisemite's because we're all full of self loathing thanks to our overbearing mothers" (this was in a joking manner to be clear)
The best part, or worse depending on your perspective, is that the 'Semitic' peoples of the world, as a race, aren't just Jews. Arabs are also a Semitic people...
So a Jew who hates Arabs is an antisemite, and vice versa.
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And in most developed nations we have seen what the roads and postal services look like after a few hundred years of government management and the costs are stacking up yearly on many of those things to the point that if Europe were to wholesale switch to electric vehicles it would be losing too much tax revenue.
The problem is scaling down some of those services (universal mail services isn't necessary for modern commerce) is politically problematic leading to massive waste. There is no such thing as a temp
Re: More wokeness (Score:2)
Re:More wokeness (Score:4, Informative)
Why the fuck do you call it communism socialist.
Because 100 million citizens died under that particular flavor of socialism, in a very short amount of time. That's why.
I wasn't degenerating anything other than the undeniable horrors found within 20th Century history. Ironically, you appear to be validating my entire fucking point about learning from it.
Re:More wokeness (Score:5, Insightful)
Give me a modern example of where communism succeeded. There are more recent examples: Venezuela, failed, South Africa, failing, Somalia, failed.
Here is a long list of failures:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Give me a modern example of where communism succeeded. There are more recent examples: Venezuela, failed, South Africa, failing, Somalia, failed.
China?
[incoming No True Scotsman argument in 5 ... 4 ....]
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is this an ai talking? this is most npc response to what i said i could have possibly expected. your 3rd grade teacher should retroactively give you a zero for reading comprehension
"ill show this guy im not living in cold war propoganda... look how evil communism was! the world is so simple! communism equals evil! why are they evil? doesnt matter, theyre just evil! evil for the sake of evil! context means communism and communism equal evil"
yawn, you know you can frame the downsides of communist countries in the 20th century properly and people will still come out thinking it was a failed system, they might just actually be able to understand why. cant have that can we?.
this is actually woke thinking, the idea that if anyone is exposed to the merest bit of context they will immediately become indoctrinated so just eliminate it all out of fear. way to go woketard
It isn't so much that 'Leftism' fails, its more that in order to implement 'Leftist' economic and social policies, working against selfishness and greed, they have to be authoritarian. So, although 'Communism' is supposed to be all happy happy joy joy, it becomes a totalitarian state nightmare.
This is because selfishness and greed are at the very core of life itself, nothing lives except at the expense of another living thing. To rein that in and control it, the 'Communist' state has to be... bossy.
And, so,
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More KNOWLEDGE (Score:5, Insightful)
There are many current classifications that are based on morphological similarities that DO NOT result from genetic closeness
For the sake of improving our understanding of the tree of life, it is necessary to analyze the genetics and reclassify many of the species that we "think" we know
Frankly, removing, or reducing to a footnote, the original classifiers of these species should be part of the process as we move to a naming system that reflects genetic relationships
Re: More KNOWLEDGE (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
You can’t even define “wokeness”
Re:More wokeness (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally I'm going with the DeSantis woke defintion.
DeSantis' general counsel, Ryan Newman, responded that the term means "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them."
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Your post cracks me up. The modern term "woke" comes from black Americans and it's about being aware of negative racial issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]! .
What you're writing about is the conservative rebranding which is basically calling anything and everything they have negative issues with "woke". It's like the conservative rebranding of feminism where you'll hear a female conservative newscaster start with "well I'm no feminist" and then proceed lay out completely feminist views not even realizi
Re:More wokeness (Score:5, Insightful)
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Funny, they still haven't renamed "Hooker Creek"... even more surprisingly, there is a Hooker Creek Construction Materials company in Bend, OR...
Hooker is fine.
Its like with the old IDE hard drives, where you used to have 'master' and 'slave' drives.
These days its more correct to refer to them as 'pimp' and 'ho' drives, though the technology has fallen out of use.
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I suppose I shouldnt be surprised to see lame culture war nonsense starting off the discussions under this post. I dont think there's anything "woke" about disliking Hitler and thinking that things shouldnt be named after some one like him pretty logically follows. If we're going to name a species after a person it shouldnt be after the biggest villains in history like Hitler or slave traders and if we mistakenly did so in the past there's no harm in changing things.
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This isn't really history, it's scientific community consensus. The naming is relatively unimportant except for classification purposes. The species exists regardless of names, and in many cases these species had local names anyway before some foreign scientist "discovered" them and named them after their mother. There's no hard and fast rule here, scientifically, about how to name things it's just a very weak convention that's been around for a very short period of time.
This is not woke, it's just ration
Re:More wokeness (Score:4, Insightful)
Really? Ruining *history*? So people won't remember who Adolph Hitler was if Anophthalmus hitleri gets a new name? Pearl-clutching and predicting the doom of civilization seems a bit of an overreaction.
I think people who use a convention and for whom the convention exists should get to control it however they see fit. If entolmologists don't like using the name "A. hitleri" then let them change the name; it's not a problem for you and me so our feelings about it don't matter. Taxonomists are continually changing systematics, splitting and reorganizing clades. Perhaps the biggest PITA is when they split a species up. But *renaming* clade without reorgnizing it is really no trouble at all.
Likewise, it should be up to the people living in a town who gets a statue there on public property. If the people who live in Charlotte or Richmond don't want a statue of Robert E. Lee, they shouldn't have to put up with one. Charlotte actually melting down their Lee statue doesn't harm history in the least -- people still know who he was. Richmond put theirs in a black history museum. It's really hard to argue that's bad for history, if anything people have a better idea who the *historical* Lee actually was.
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Re:More wokeness (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree that humans stamping their names on mountains says more about us than the mountain. How about using names that are instead descriptive, like "Grand Teton"? Oops that's another reflection on human nature (lonely French-Canadian trappers).
It is silliness. Stellar's bluejay has become somehow offensive. Now between us and the Jay, many of these critters were named after the person that went to the trouble to do the exploration and cataloging. So perhaps towns and cities and streets and airports need to be stripped of their names and named something else. Perhaps numbers? Though that might upset the people that flunked math.
As well, there is a push to rename these critters to descriptive names. Okay - that makes sense if there was only one hairy backed weevil, but there are often multiple very similar weevils with hairy backs.
Now to the thread topic, because yes, it is rather related.
The obsession with hypercategorization, and the political underpinnings of it, is a monumental waste of time. The so called alphabet people, which started out as lesbian and gay, then added bisexual, then transgender, and now has a plus added is one example. And the demand to call genetic males as legal women has a tapdance into "birthing people". Frankly, that seems to be rude to genetic males who want to be called women and are upset that they cannot give birth.
And then there is the incredible number of preferred pronouns, and it's need to never finish a list of them.
Make no mistake, I have zero issue with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or transgenders. They are just people, perhaps with a different perspective, but people just the same. I do have an issue with people who overcategorize though, and feel the need to rename everything - they don't realize in the end, they look pretty stupid, and aren't helping people. Back to the renaming of already named animals.
It's rewriting history. If my example of Georg Wilhelm Steller, who spent much of his life "discovering" and recording and categorizing species in the mid 1700's, almost 250 years ago, and it has very specifically identified the bird without any problems since then, but now it's offensive or something? Meh.
INGSOC approves of the rewriting of history, amirite.
Re: More wokeness (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know if that particular name is being changed because it's problematic or if it's just general policy, but if I looked it up to find out (which I would do if I weren't on my cell right now) I would learn something about history, in which case MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.
But I do know that not naming species after people in the future can reduce churn of names in the future, because there will always be some percentage of people who are shitty and have species named for them, and those names would otherwise be singled out and changed later.
I also never knew the stellar Jay was named after a person even though I've lived in their range for almost all of my life. I probably never would have known if not for this change.
Re: More wokeness (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know if that particular name is being changed because it's problematic or if it's just general policy, but if I looked it up to find out (which I would do if I weren't on my cell right now) I would learn something about history, in which case MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.
But I do know that not naming species after people in the future can reduce churn of names in the future, because there will always be some percentage of people who are shitty and have species named for them, and those names would otherwise be singled out and changed later.
I also never knew the stellar Jay was named after a person even though I've lived in their range for almost all of my life. I probably never would have known if not for this change.
Here's a link. https://www.npr.org/2023/11/01... [npr.org]
Only slightly tongue in cheek, perhaps it would be more pleasing to those in power who plan on removing human names altogether, especiallt those that are offensive or exclusionary. From the NPR article:
"That's because the American Ornithological Society has vowed to change the English names of all bird species currently named after people, along with any other bird names deemed offensive or exclusionary.
"Names have power and power can be for the good or it can be for the bad," says Colleen Handel, the society's president and a research wildlife biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Alaska. "We want these names to be powerful in a really good way."
Here's their problem. If we go rewriting history every time some group wields their power, and decides it must happen, I would like to imagine if the inclusive folks are likewise thinking that is a non-inclusive group came along, that that group has as much right to rewrite history.
Reminds me a little bit like the Soviet communist theory of Lysenkoism. Purging of science for politics.
While science cannot completely extricate itself from the politics, especially those who wish to weld their politics to every aspect of human life, obviously the INGSOC-like removal of any trace of humanity, and by the way, disrespecting those explorers who went to the trouble of finding and classifying various species - they tip their hand that while claiming inclusivity, they are as exclusive as those they hate. I wonder about their thoughts on erasing women who had species named after them. I mean, historical female figures now consigned to nothingness.
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Is it really "history" though? People get worked up, but names change constantly. These days it seems "history" is anything earlier than 2000. Roads change names, towns change names, unofficial towns get new names when incorporated, railroads named towns sometimes with randomized names with no meaning behind them. Birds change names all the times, the locals had a name before and they still use the local name even if distant scientists decided on something else. So many different species all called "dad
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Original Russian name for Denali was essentially "Big Mountain" :-)
There are a lot of place names that are also degraded forms of earlier names that were more descriptive. I think one small town in central California was interesting. Originally Deutsch Corners (German immigrants lived there), became Dutch Corners (Americans be stupid), and later Ducor and was officialized because it was a railroad stop. Actually, some railroad administrator named a ton of stops which became town names. Some of the towns
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Re:More wokeness (Score:5, Insightful)
it's at the bottom because, while we do want to credit those who discover/invent, it's on the wrong side of the "Small minds discuss people." coin
and frankly we need to backpedal from that coin more than ever, the celebrity worship of idols/influencers/thots/personalities is worse than ever and the tribal groupthink is slowly wreaking havoc
What's truly sad about this whole situation is the "influencers" that people worship are the most arbitrarily attacking weirdos in all of history. You're mention of George Washington is on-point here. Some want us to pretend the man never existed because he owned slaves. History exists, and trying to erase it is a sure-fire way to have it echo in the future.
We're in a really weird place as a species. Some of us are grown up enough to realize we've made mistakes in the past, but some of us aren't quite to the point where we understand that it's OK to learn from past mistakes, and remember them as mistakes. Instead we think erasure is the solution to those mistakes. That's not how you learn and improve and continue to progress, that's actually how you destroy progress.
It's like our entire race seems stuck in puberty. We don't know where we want to go as a collective, the only thing we're sure of is that right now fuggin' sucks and far too many of us are involved in pubescent temper tantrums over it.
We can do better. But until we get past trying to demonize members of our species exclusively, rather than looking at individuals as they are--flawed people that sometimes did something impressive which doesn't take away their flaws--we are going to be stuck in this greed and hate spiral we're currently in. If we insist on safe-spacing and sanitizing all of history, trying to pretend that only perfection is acceptable? We're not going to continue to grow up. We'll be like that seventy year old still driving his camaro and talking about how his band is gonna make it big someday. Forever a teenager, unable to see that adulthood already passed him by.
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History doesn't erase these people though even if some names change. Ie, the segregation era statues put up in the south were not really "historical", except in the sense that these existed and thus are in history. The losing side of a war, some of actually indept military officers, monuments to white supremacy, erected precisely to stick a middle finger at the feds and to send a warning to minorities to know their place. It is NOT erasing history to take down those statues. The history books all record
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it's at the bottom because, while we do want to credit those who discover/invent, it's on the wrong side of the "Small minds discuss people." coin
And you wouldn't want that coin to made of vonbraunium now, would you?
You are coming at this backwards (Score:4, Insightful)
In 1937, a brown, eyeless beetle was found in a few caves in Slovenia.
If you really, really hate Hitler - what better way to immortalize that hate than name a blind cave insect after him?
"Oh yeah that's the Hitler beetle, blind as fuck and can't even leave the cave like other normal insects".
Even if they go ahead with the name change they should at least find some species of worm to name after Hitler...
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Even then that only works for species names. If you name a genus and then find a closely related species that needs to be classified together but doesn't share the trait you named the other one for in Latin, you are going to be breaking the rule anyway or renaming the genus.
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Even if they go ahead with the name change they should at least find some species of worm to name after Hitler...
Uh, let's not crawl down that hole.
I rather enjoy the many types of oranges grown in America, and don't feel like being subjected to rampant TDS because I'm caught eating a Trump varietal...
Re: You are coming at this backwards (Score:2)
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No, I think a blind beetle is more fitting. Rats have some decent characteristics.
Sounds like a kettle of fish (Score:5, Funny)
They could do what MMOs do. Anophthalmus hitleri -> Anophthalmus RenamedUser81035839, and then everyone gets to wonder at what the cheeky name was that slipped past the filters but got caught later.
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Reminds me of the user "Bator". Innocent name, isn't it?
If you could now have the title of "Master", it certainly would be.
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And then other games decide to just run with it and give you the title 'Master Baiter' for fishing achievements.
Silly waste of time (Score:5, Insightful)
Taken to the extreme, all names change every few years as the political winds shift and researchers will need an dated index to determine what something was called during the time a paper was written
Meanwhile, actual research will slow as endless arguments over names consume all available time
Welcome to the moronosphere
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Taken to the extreme, all names change every few years as the political winds shift and researchers will need an dated index to determine what something was called during the time a paper was written
Welcome to the slippery slope fallacy folks!
Nothing about changing the name of a bug named after Hitler means that we're going to be changing everything every few years. That's utter nonsense that you just made up.
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Nevermind the fact that they are quelling a revolution in the name of revolt.
Re: Silly waste of time (Score:2)
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And book still have the names printed on the spine. At least you would have a rigid structure to fall back on for digital records.
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Re: Silly waste of time (Score:2)
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Dewey? We don't, but we should
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Imagine how many translations and transliterations the existing names already have anyway.
But you never translate binomial taxonomy to another language, that's one the major advantages of the Linnaean system. A cat is a Felis catus no matter what language you speak.
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I also mentioned transliterate. If you are using a language without Latin characters, you don't always write the taxonomy with Latin characters. You can't tell me that they are not written with Kanji, Cyrillic or Hangul and with potentially inconsistent transliteration - which does lead to problems matching them up.
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Yes, I would. Funny beetle names are actually funny.
This could go too far. (Score:2)
Just waiting for the new name for this. [wikipedia.org]
Caffra derived from Kaffer? (Score:3)
The first plant google found using Caffra was named in 1850 ... that's a little before South Americans started calling blacks Kaffers.
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Oops, I meant South African (racists).
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Betteridge's Law (Score:5, Insightful)
No.
Seriously, what are people afraid of?
Is naming an obscure beetle after Hitler going to empower Nazism in some way?
Magic's not real, folks.
Re:Betteridge's Law (Score:5, Insightful)
I think people think that it's some kind of honor and people will forget about disfavored people if you eradicate their statues and things named after them.
The truth is, go walk in a historical park and you'll find lots of statues of people that _no one_ remembers. Meanwhile, Hitler will be remembered equally regardless of whether the beetle is renamed or not. Hell, the only reason we know about the beetle is because of his fame (infamy, I guess).
Illustration of this was a podiatrist I had working on my foot. His last name was Von Steuben. Now, I know that there was a (well, for some definition) famous guy named Von Steuben who trained up the Continental army at Valley Forge, PA during the winter of 1776. Turns out my podiatrist is a relative. The thing is, I figured that lots of people brought it up. He said I was one of about three over thirty years of practice. There's a statue of this guy in the Valley Forge historical park. Virtually no one remembers him.
Maybe it's just virtue signaling. Either way, it's misguided.
Re:Betteridge's Law (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not virtue signaling. What it is is that they don't like names that make *them* uncomfortable. If nothing is done, the folks they dislike will be forgotten in a century or less. (OK, Hitler is a extreme example. But what about Julius Caesar, he was even worse and nobody remembers that part. They remember he was powerful.)
I'm quite amenable to the idea that going forwards no new species should be named after people. I'm not amenable to changing existing names. That has been done in the past and caused problems. Just wait awhile and the people will be forgotten. (Having their names remembered does no harm as long as you don't laud their despicable actions.)
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I'm kinda wondering that myself. He was brutal, and conquering the Gauls he killed many thousands most of whose only sin was that they didn't want to be conquered by the Romans. Hitler killed millions in ways Caesar couldn't even have imagined.
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Illustration of this was a podiatrist I had working on my foot. His last name was Von Steuben. Now, I know that there was a (well, for some definition) famous guy named Von Steuben who trained up the Continental army at Valley Forge, PA during the winter of 1776. Turns out my podiatrist is a relative. The thing is, I figured that lots of people brought it up. He said I was one of about three over thirty years of practice. There's a statue of this guy in the Valley Forge historical park. Virtually no one remembers him.
I took a Midshipman training cruise on the Ballistic Missile Submarine USS Von Steuben (SSBN-632) back in the day, so I know of him :) . Was my first time on the East Coast after growing up on the West Coast all my life. Found out to my surprise that TV channels were not universal (ABC was on channel 5, not channel 7 like in Los Angeles), Monday Night Football came on at 9 PM and that the Caribbean has some of the bluest water in the world. Good times :)
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I think people think that it's some kind of honor and people will forget about disfavored people if you eradicate their statues and things named after them.
You were so close and then lost it. Yes having things named after oneself is traditionally considered an honor. It gets pretty simple after that though, we just plain shouldnt be honoring people like Hitler and slave traders. No one's claiming Hitler or the slave trade will be forgotten because we change the name of a bug, that's just a nonsense strawman you just made up so you could justify the rest of your post. It's a matter of propriety, people like Hitler should not be receiving honors. Slave traders s
Re: Betteridge's Law (Score:3)
Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
"Anophthalmus hitleri has an objectionable sound to modern ears".
Only pathetic self-indulgent snowflake ears. It's just a couple of words. Most of the people - if any exist - who object to it would calmly carry on with their lives while the most frightful things happen in reality.
As we have seen lately.
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Go ahead and name something Mohammedwassarapist and see how that goes over. Try Jesusisntreal and see how his followers react.
No (Score:5, Insightful)
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I guess now we're going to have discussions about the beetle formerly known as Hitler?
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Terms have already changed and nobody protested. Do medical texts still refer to people as morons, dullards, or imbeciles?
Why?
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What do they call them now?
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http://www.assessmentpsycholog... [assessmentpsychology.com]
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We are going to rename stuff because some people are offended by the name? No. Just no.
Sigh... this has already happened countless times throughout the evolution of the English language. There's nothing wrong with it other than someone is suggesting something like this now when our conservatives are currently waging a nonsense culture war and so are extra sensitive about everything
easy peasy (Score:2)
[looks up name of critic of changing species names to remove those honoring history's greatest mass murderers]
[finds new bug in Amazon jungle]
[names it " isathrobbingtoolbagii"]
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(Dangit, I thought if I chose "Plain Old Text" it'd let me use angle brackets. What I meant was:)
[looks up name of critic of changing species names to remove those honoring history's greatest mass murderers]
[finds new bug in Amazon jungle]
[names it "Genus dudesNameisathrobbingtoolbagii"]
Gotta keep those taxonomists busy! (Score:2)
If they didn't undertake massive renaming efforts every few decades... how many taxonomists would the world really need?
(I'm still annoyed by the plant family renamings that went on a few decades ago)
GUIDs (Score:2)
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That's not actually a bad idea. Have the GUID be based around the genetic code.
This is actually more reasonable (if extremely laborious) than it sounds, because species aren't really good boundaries...they're merely good approximations of the actual boundaries. Of course the end result is that every individual would have a slightly different GUID code, so it would need to be a number that could hold all the bacteria and viruses in the world, with a bit of slop for the multicellular folks.
That sounds like
I fail to see the problem (Score:2)
Hitler being the namesake for a blind, disgusting little bug?
What's not fitting about that?
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So when they got a few of these bugs down to the lab. When trying to figure out what to feed them, it was learned that those bugs would eat or drink just about anything .. except juice, they really hated the juice.
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The beetle itself is also a reference to the Volkswagen, a lasting legacy of Nazi engineered vehicles. Or something like that.
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Hitler's big promise of the Volkswagen that was only fulfilled after he finally croaked and his Reich with him.
Answer to the question (Score:2)
too late (Score:2, Offtopic)
Given the complete lack of critical thinking skills imparted on our future generations, we can expect even further decline and greater emphasis on non-productive warm fuzzies, pseudo science, and social engineering.
Let's have a WOR.D WAR (Score:2)
Sad to see the media becoming an increasingly destructive professional trolling organization for purely self-serving reasons. They deliberately choose to amplify irrelevant musings of outliers not because there is any value or purpose in it. They do it for effect to push everyone's buttons.
If you are a ZOMG hitler type of person you've learned something new to be outraged over.
If you are a ZOMG next level insanity from perpetually offended loudmouths sort you too have something new to be outraged over.
Eve
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Things such as species named after Hitler, and statues honouring racist slave owners, are golden opportunities to highlight and warn against everything from basic unfairness to great evil. Erasing them from history is like pardoning a murderer and then expunging his record.
I think there are better ways to learn about history than to continue to fund public displays honoring bad people.
The beetle itself is relatively unimportant zoologically. Its only significance is its name. I'm not sure why you plan to die on this hill, but there won't be a statue there in your honor.
Erasing them from history is like pardoning a murderer and then expunging his record.
Or, you know, we could just teach the history. Could even have a footnote that someone named a beetle after Hitler. In History class.
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Or, you know, we could just teach the history. Could even have a footnote that someone named a beetle after Hitler. In History class.
yeah, 100% of students in the U.S. learn and remember all the facts, even the teeny, tiny, obscure ones for the rest of their lives.
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The beetle itself is relatively unimportant zoologically. Its only significance is its name. I'm not sure why you plan to die on this hill
The problem is, once started, this process will never stop. If this goes forward, there will be entire dissertations and departments focused on finding and purging questionable names. And once there isn't enough, they will expand to names that are phonetically similar to something questionable that may have been said centuries ago.
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>>There are two official names for the element because Americans were crybabies about wanting their preferred spelling to be recognized.
Um, NO
Aluminum was the original spelling until some British pencil pusher wanted the names of the elements to follow the same naming conventions as Potassium and Sodium etc, so the 'um' at the end of Aluminum was replaced with a 'ium' resulting in Aluminium
There is simply little value in Sir Henry Percy's attempt to make his notions part of the classification
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There *was* little value. Now... consistency is a virtue. Of the two names for the same element, we should prefer the one that is more consistent with the rest of the names.
But I'm not about to start calling sodium Natron, or silver Argentium (or whatever the Latin for silver is). Consistency is a virtue, but it's not an extreme virtue.
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"renaming entire law schools (Hastings, a decently prestigious public law school in California) because the guy was involved in Indian wars."
I am pretty sure that there were no Indians in the battle of Hastings in 1066.
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NOT same as toppling a dictator's statue (Score:2)
Taking away the name and rewriting that tiny bit of history is simply childish. It is JUST an ID and has no meaning (other than what people imagine) so you could argue then it doesn't matter if you change it to appease whatever fad of the day or sell the name to a brand, it doesn't matter. This is correct; however, it is not completely the same and creates errors, confusion, complications in the historical record which goes against the whole purpose of an official identification!
A statue is a public display
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Thanks for volunteering to update everything. Should be a pretty trivial task to go to every library in the world and scour every book for these names and replace them with the new name.