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

Fri Jun 23 11:42:34 CDT 2023

If species names are just labels/unique identifiers, and the original
published name is the most important, and gender agreement is complex to
get right and is confusing to amateurs etc, and making a massive list of
all names will be costly and difficult, and gender agreement is an outdated
practise from a previous era, and gender agreement might not be regarded as
'inclusive' in this day and age, then its seems like a jolly good idea to
get rid of it and revert to the original published names!

George

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*Dr George Beccaloni FLS*
*Director, Alfred Russel Wallace Correspondence Project*

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On Fri, 23 Jun 2023 at 17:30, Douglas Yanega via Taxacom <
taxacom at lists.ku.edu> wrote:

> 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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>          is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82
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> Nurturing nuance while assailing ambiguity and admiring alliteration for
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