[Taxacom] Does the species name have to change when it moves genus?

[Frederick W. Schueler]

On 6/18/2012 2:18 PM, Roderic Page wrote:
> OK, I know this is what we do, but my question is "why do we do this?"

* "Tradition." I think there was a song about this.

Uninominal nomenclature has been proposed...

Schueler, Frederick W., and James D.  Rising.  1972.  The stability of 
A.O.U. Checklist names for North American birds, and uninominal 
nomenclature. 26th Ontario Universities Biological Conference, Toronto. 
Published as: Rising, James D., and Frederick W.  Schueler.  1972.  How 
stable is binominal nomenclature?  Systematic Zoology 21:438-439.

...the first revisor puts a hyphen between the genus and species names, 
and from then that hyphenated name is tied to the type of the binominal 
name it was formed from, and it doesn't change.

This never caught on, and I think the reason is the offense that's given 
by the mismatch between the generic name in the name (so to speak), and 
the different genus the species may be assigned to.

fred.
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>
> As names change over time it becomes a major challenge to find everything published about a taxon. Some groups, such as frogs, are especially prone to name changes as their classification is unstable. Frogs have a pretty good online database detailing name changes, but most animal groups lack this, leaving people like me floundering around trying to make sense of multiple names why may or may not be for the same thing.
>
> It seems to me that names should be unique and stable. We don't change the name of a species called "africanus" if we discover that the specimen locality was actually from Australia, nor do we change the name "maximus" if we subsequently discover a bigger species. But we do if we move it to a new genus. Why?
>
> Presumably it's because we like the idea of being able to interpret the name - two members of the same genus are presumably more closely related to each other than to a species in a different genus. But demonstrably that is often untrue (otherwise we wouldn't have all the name changes due to moving species to different genera), and we've learnt not to interpret the name literally when inferring any biological attributes, so why the desire to have the name match some current notion of classification? Why not simply accept that we can't infer relationships from the name?
>
> It seems to be that if we simply stopped trying to make names reflect classification, at a stroke we'd remove perhaps the primary cause of nomenclatural instability. For example, the recent case of Drosophila melanogaster would be a non-issue. It's "Drosophila melanogaster" regardles sof whether it's nested in the part of the fly tree that includes Sophophora. The relationships of the taxon would have no bearing on its name.
>
> Discuss.
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------
> Roderic Page
> Professor of Taxonomy
> Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine
> College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences
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>
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-- 

fred
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