[Taxacom] Restoring indigenous names

Thu Nov 5 03:09:36 CST 2020

 Very interesting Igor. This may have set a worrying precedent and a slippery slope to more and more radical renaming proposals for political reasons. As I commented off-list to someone, you cannot cancel history and famous people can fall in and out of favour, but we need taxonomic names to be stable. For example, the Americans might want to use taxonomic names to honour high achieving Afro-Americans. But then you get a case like Bill Cosby! This would mean thant, effectively, the fate of taxonomic names would be decided by juries in criminal trials! To fight against anti-Semitism, we might want to use taxonomic names to honour high achieving Jews. Oh dear, those weinsteini and epsteini patronyms now all need changing and writing out of history! Also, of course, one person's hero is another person's villian! What do we think about trumpi patronyms? I really thought science was supposed to be above all this nonsense, but apparently not!Cheers, Stephen
    On Thursday, 5 November 2020, 08:22:24 pm NZDT, igor pavlinov <ipvl2008 at mail.ru> wrote:  

 Not the same as NZ case, but also concerns changing scientific taxonomic names for non-scientific reasons: 
Animal name changes in Turkey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_name_changes_in_Turkey Igor- - -
Igor Ya. Pavlinov, DrS
Zoological Museum of Lomonosov Moscow State University
ul. Bol'shaya Nikitskaya 6
125009 Moscow
Russia
http://zmmu.msu.ru/personal/pavlinov/pavlinov1.htm 
http://zmmu.msu.ru/personal/pavlinov/pavlinov_eng1.htm

Четверг, 5 ноября 2020, 8:40 +03:00 от Stephen Thorpe via Taxacom <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>:
 The extent to which this proposal is being pushed is somewhat alarming:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/change-species-names-to-honor-indigenous-peoples-not-colonizers-researchers-say/
We all know that the system is broken. Have we really now reached the point where history (including scientific history) can be dragged into cancel culture? Could a couple of average ecologists, working for average (at best) tertiary institutions in New Zealand, really throw global taxonomy into nomenclatural chaos, just because their own personal cultural axes to grind fit in  with a growing global wokist bandwagon? I sincerely hope not! The reality is that institutions here in N.Z. (and elsewhere) are under political pressure to be seen to fighting racial inequality. The problem cannot, of course, be solved, so they will grasp the easiest option to be seen to be doing something, and attacking biological nomenclature might be one such easy option. Don't say I didn't warn you!
Stephen On Wednesday, 4 November 2020, 03:11:11 pm NZDT, Stephen Thorpe <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz> wrote:

  PS: I don't know about the two authors of this particular proposal, but, in general, I am staggered by the hypocrisy of academics in general who push for these kinds of woke proposals, since, at the same time, they are working within a system which routinely acquires public funding for the primary purpose of maximising institutional revenue, often exaggerating and/or misrepresenting the merits of such projects. Who do they think benefits the most from this? Answer: Rich middle-aged white guys (and rich middle-aged white women). Oh well, all will be forgiven if we use indigenous names for taxa!! Yeah, right ...
    On Wednesday, 4 November 2020, 02:42:16 pm NZDT, Stephen Thorpe <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz> wrote:

  There are off-list emails already going out about this, and not exactly in favour of the proposal! Hopefully, the proposal can simply be ignored, as any changes to biological nomenclature would have to be made at an international level, and they have little reason to take much notice of little old N.Z. Shane Wright's opinion on this matter can hardly be expected to be unbiased. The worry, though, is that this can be seen as another step in a much bigger movement which is gaining traction globally, i.e. tearing down colonialist statues, taking episodes of the 1970s comedy Fawlty Towers off the air, etc. Ironically, I agree with our former deputy-pm, Winston Peters, who is half Maori himself that this "woke culture" is misguided and unhelpful and that every nation makes mistakes in their history, so we should learn from those mistakes but not try to hide them.
Stephen
    On Wednesday, 4 November 2020, 02:20:11 pm NZDT, Geoff Read via Taxacom <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu> wrote:

Hi all,

My local newspaper pointed out this opinion piece this morning.

Gillman, Len Norman; Wright, Shane Donald. 2020. Restoring indigenous
names in taxonomy. Communications Biology 3(1): 609

Open access https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-020-01344-y

Certainly there are unfortunate original  names out there.

--
Geoffrey B. Read, Ph.D.
Wellington, NEW ZEALAND
gread at actrix.gen.nz

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