Taxacom: Biston betularia moth names

[Robert Zuparko]

I'm with John on this. To quote Shakespeare:

 "Oh, to deep-six the need for gender agreement! How much sweeter might the
world be?"
I'm not sure which play this was from - maybe one of the Henrys? Or maybe a
sonnet?.

-Bob Zuparko

On Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 7:01 AM John Grehan via Taxacom <
taxacom at lists.ku.edu> wrote:

> A colleague sent me a copy of the following:
> Cook, L.M. & Muggleton, J. 2003. The peppered moth, Biston betularia
> (Linnaeus, 1758) (Lepidoptera: Geometridae): a matter of names. The
> Entomologist's Gazette 54: 211-221.
>
> Below is an excerpt of the conclusion section concerning gender agreement.
> This is from a few years back, so nothing particularly new here. Gender
> agreement is the one aspect of the Code that I have not followed in my
> group of study (Hepialidae) - with only one exception to my recollection
> where a gender agreement form is well established as the accepted name in
> New Zealand. This decision followed that of Ebbe Schmidt Nielsen (2000) for
> the group, and to avoid the nightmare of trying to establish a consistency
> of names where the gender of some genera is unknown or ambiguous, and
> especially where I was involved in a substantial number of generic
> reassignments of species. I don't know if this paper is open access, but if
> not and anyone wants a copy just let me know.
>
> Cheers, John Grehan
>
> "Regulation does, however, bring its own problems. The intention of the
> Code
> of Zoological Nomenclature is admirable. It is essential to have such a
> system in
> taxonomy if we are to be able to refer precisely to a particular species.
> When
> many species are considered in taxonomic works, the Code must be adhered to
> exactly. In a group such as the British Macrolepidoptera, however, there
> are
> almost no difficult taxonomic questions, and nearly all species have well
> known
> common names. Nevertheless, for various bookkeeping reasons their
> scientific
> names are continually changing, sometimes as fast as the species themselves
> are evolving. Thus, Gonodontis bidentata (Clerck, 1759) showed a
> distinctive pattern of melanism across north-west England in the 1970s
> (Bishop et al., 1978), now changing in Odontopera bidentata (Cook et al.,
> 2002). Lees (1971) established the distribution of melanism in Britain in
> Phigalia pedaria (Fabricius) in the late 1960s. Studies of this species,
> under the name Phigalia pilosaria ([Denis & Schiffermiiller]), 1775) showed
> that it did not much alter in the Midlands over the next decade (Lees,
> 1981) but Apocheima pilosaria is now showing a definite decline in melanic
> frequency (Cook, Riley & Woiwod, 2002). The example of the Peppered Moth
> illustrates well the fact that agreement in gender performs no useful
> function in a world where the genus names regularly change. Moreover, it
> may generate arcane problems that are of no relevance to biology.
> If Treitschke had intended Amphidasys when he named the genus, but misspelt
> it, it would have been masculine. If the version he used was a
> deliberate latinization, however, it becomes feminine. The difference in
> treatment by Staudinger in the two references quoted suggests that he was
> conscious of this problem. We have no way, and no reason, to know what
> Treitschke thought and in a multilingual world that does not presume
> knowledge of Latin and classical Greek it is time to let the rule on
> agreement go. There are hundreds of papers on melanism in the Peppered
> Moth, its frequency about the country, its progressive change and its
> genetics. Nomenclatural usage in them, in Britain at any rate, has its
> origin in Ford (1937). Despite the manifest incorrectness of betularia and
> the oddity of choosing carbonaria, we suggest that these two names should
> continue in use for this particular body of literature."
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> Nurturing nuance while assailing ambiguity for about 35 years, 1987-2022.
>


-- 
Robert Zuparko
Essig Museum of Entomology
1101 Valley Life Sciences Building, #4780
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-3112
(510) 643-0804

It's not a fetish. When a scientist does it, it's an "area of interest." Ze
Frank, True Facts