Taxacom: demystifying gender agreement ( was Re: Removals of offending scientific names)

[Douglas Yanega]

On 6/22/23 8:37 PM, John Grehan wrote:
> I am not as acquainted with all the experts out there that have 
> commented on this issue, but for the World Catalogue of Hepialidae 
> (hopefully published within a week or two at most) the authors 
> followed a precedent set by some past major players in 
> hepialid taxonomy and used the original form of the species name, 
> regardless of whether correct in the first place, or now in a genus 
> with a different gender. Keeps life simple, and as far as I am 
> concerned, quite comprehensible.

In principle, that could be true - about it keeping things simple - but 
in practice, it does not seem to work that way.

The principle relies on all lepidopterists, and all other taxonomists 
using lepidopteran names, having access to a single authoritative master 
list of names (otherwise, people would need to each have access to 
copies of the original literature). In practice, there are LOTS of 
different sources for lep names, and they are very commonly in conflict 
with one another, here and there. The same species can have two 
different spellings scattered throughout the literature, as well as 
online sources, and that is not "keeping it simple".

The very first butterfly name I looked up just now - a butterfly I 
learned as "Mitoura gryneus" several decades ago - is one that stuck in 
my head as a budding entomologist because it was the very first time in 
my life I had learned a scientific name that was explained to me as 
being a gender mismatch, and when I first learned that lepidopterists 
didn't use gender agreement. The noteworthy thing about it is that if 
you do a verbatim Google search, you can find hundreds of sources that 
have "Mitoura gryneus", hundreds more that have "Mitoura grynea", 
hundreds more that have "Callophrys gryneus", and hundreds more that 
have "Callophrys grynea".

That does not at all look simple to me, and *that's just the first name 
I looked up*. I'm willing to wager that if there are other common leps 
with obvious gender mismatches, that they'll have a very high 
probability of appearing in the literature with multiple conflicting 
spellings.

This exemplifies EXACTLY why I advocate for a single authoritative 
master list. No system of gender agreement, even ZERO gender agreement, 
is going to ensure that everyone, everywhere, is on the same page unless 
there is a single shared resource that everyone uses to obtain the 
proper spelling. When everyone does their own independent research, 
people can come to different conclusions, leading to inconsistency. If 
the master list gives the spelling variants, *and tells you when to use 
which variant*, then there is no reason not to keep gender agreement. 
Both approaches - keeping gender agreement or abandoning it - at *that* 
point would require exactly the same amount of effort: typing a name 
into a search engine linked to a list, and following the result.

It's called "having our cake and eating it too".

Peace,

-- 
Doug Yanega      Dept. of Entomology       Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314     skype: dyanega
phone: (951) 827-4315 (disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
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