Article in Discover magazine

[Robin Leech]

Even people have binomens for themselves, be it Ken Kinman, Joshua Foer,
Ernst Mayr, Robin Leech or even Robin Leach.  There must be a reason I
don't know Ken Kinman as only Ken or Kinman.  Do you suppose that by
his binomen I know exactly who he is?
Or Good ol' Ernst!  Ernst?  Ernst who?

And our vehicles are known as Subaru Outback and Ford Galaxie.  Perhaps
we had better explore the reason for these binomens and the wherefores of
them arising everywhere, and of them being so important for communication.

Of course, for those famous (or infamous) items, we can use a monomial - for
example, San Francisco and Seattle, but the system breaks down for such
monomials as London (cuz there is another one in Ontario), Moscow (cuz
there is another one in Idaho), Banff (cuz there is one in Canada, and one
in
Scotland), etc.

No, Ken, er, ah, I mean no, Ken Kinman, I think the binomial system for
biological and other nomenclatorial systems is here to stay, though I can
see
that there will be continuous attacks on the fortress walls till the
opposition
runs out of ammo.  It is too easy to becme lost in monomials (better word,
I think, than uninomials or mononomials).
Robin

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ken Kinman" <kinman2 at YAHOO.COM>
To: <TAXACOM at LISTSERV.NHM.KU.EDU>
Sent: Monday, March 14, 2005 8:05 AM
Subject: Article in Discover magazine


> Dear All,
>     Has anyone seen the April issue of Discover magazine yet?  I hear that
> there is an article by Joshua Foer entitled "Pushing Phylocode: What if we
> decide to rename every living thing on earth?".  The title seems to be a
> bit of an exaggeration, but I assume Joshua is definitely not in favor of
> PhyloCode either.  Hmmmm, I wonder if he realizes that they want to rename
> a lot of extinct things as well?  Anyway, I assume he is mainly referring
> to getting rid of binomials-----but even IF the first phase of PhyloCode
> survives at all, the second phase (reducing species to uninomials)
> certainly will not.
>  --- Cheers,
>            Ken
>