(Click on the link to listen to an audio version of this blog ….True names )
There is a very human impulse to want to put names on the things around us and then put those named things into neat, well organized, intellectual boxes. It is an obsessive compulsive tendency that is probably etched into some subset of the genes that make us human! Knowing the “true name” of something gives you, at the very least, a deep sense of connection to that thing.
In Ursula Le Quin’s Earthsea Trilogy, wizards learned to gain control over the organisms and objects in their world by learning their true names. Like these fictional wizards, ecologists and naturalists of all kinds painstakingly learn the names of the plants and animals in their ecosystems, and this knowledge helps them to more precisely observe, hypothesize and talk about the complex systems around them (a magic of a different kind!).
There are two kinds of names for biological organisms: common names and scientific names. Common names are familiar, usually generalized and relatively easy to remember. Common names are also usually written in lower case letters unless those common names are names of birds! The International Ornithological Council, The American Ornithologist’s Union, the Audubon Society and others require that the first letters of common names of birds be capitalized. The argument for this capitalization is that it makes communications about the birds must more reliable. For many of us, though, it seems quite inappropriate. Capitalize the common names of all types of organisms or capitalize none of them! Common names are inherently imprecise, and capitalizing them does not significantly correct this problem!
Scientific names sound like Latin because most of them are! They are hard to spell and pronounce, and are often very difficult to remember with any degree of precision. So why don’t we just use common names? Again, it is the problem of precision and clarity.
Puma concolor. Photo by Mythicmeadows, Wikimedia Commons
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the organism with the greatest number of different common names is the puma (Puma concolor). There are, according to Guinness, forty different names ascribed to this large, North and South American feline! Mountain lion, cougar, panther, painter and catamount are just a few of these names. I once read an historical account about “a senger who was attacked by a catamount as he drank from a stream,” and I had no idea what they were talking about! (after looking up “catamount,” I then found out that “sengers,” are people who gather wild ginseng!). Common name confusion is very common!
Another potential problem with common names is that multiple types of organisms may have the same common name. Let’s consider the common name “red worm.” That name fits two different species of earthworms, a species of roving, predaceous “bristle worm” found in estuaries (and sold as bait along the Atlantic coast of the United States), a large nematode parasite found in herons and egrets (and in a large number of intermediate hosts, too), and a thin, freshwater sediment dwelling worm that is an EPA indicator species and often sold (both live and dried out) as fish food. And, that’s just a partial list! So, if I wrote an essay about a “red worm” there would definitely be a high level of uncertainty about what organism I was discussing.
Lumbricus rubellus. Photo by H. Casselman, Wikimedia Commons
That’s where the Latinized, scientific names come in. While their spellings and pronunciations seem more than a bit strange, they always refer to just one type of organism! So if we say Eisenia foetidia or Lumbricus rubellus we know which type of “red worm” earthworm we are referring to. Or, if it’s Neris diversicolor, or Eustrongylides ignatus, then we know that we are talking about the errantial polychaete or the nematode that’s an avian parasite. Or, if it’s Tubifex tubifex, we know that we’re talking about the lake or river sediment worm (or the fish food that is made from it).
There are lots of rules for writing scientific names. One very important one is that they are written in italics (or underlined). It’s like the title of a book or a journal or a website, the italics set the scientific name apart and emphasize its singularity and importance. I always went through all of the rules for writing scientific names with my freshmen biology students, but it is quite amazing how often these rules are ignored in newspapers, magazines, web sites, and sophomore biology research papers! The key feature of a scientific name, though, is that it is absolutely unambiguous! It’s precision makes the capitalization controversy about bird names irrelevant.
So, in all of my postings over the years on The Ecologist’s Notebook, I have tried to be as precise as possible as to which species I was talking about. I have tried to include the scientific name in the post (and work very hard to spell it correctly! (a difficult task for me!)).
There are two very different views of scientific names in biology, and these views seem to be based on a degree of appreciation of the importance of organisms in our view of life. It is very interesting to realize that there are many biologists who really have had no training in or experience with actual, living organisms! These molecular biologists live in a world of proteins and nucleic acids and are exploring the depths of the reality of life well away from the requirements of looking at intact animals, plants, fungi, or bacteria.
Model of Homo neanderthalensis. J. Gurche, Wikimedia Commons
A great example of this new type of biologist is the person who led the team that sequenced the genome of the Neanderthals, Svante Paabo. In his book (Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes) he refers to the instructions that he gives to his graduate students who use Latin, scientific names in their manuscripts, “I always delete the Latin and sometimes even snidely ask who they are trying to impress by saying Pan troglodytes instead of chimpanzee.” Paabo is a brilliant molecular biologist, and his book on the search for the Neanderthal genome is excellent, but his experience in zoology in general (he admits, for example, to not knowing that insects were animals) and taxonomy in particular (“a sterile, academic exercise”) needs some expansion.
In another book The Species Seekers by Richard Conniff the religious fervor of Carolus Linnaeus (to use the Latin version of his name!) and his students to both see and describe (and name) all of the species on Earth and to put them in an orderly, taxonomic array “for the greater glory of God” is vividly described. Many of Linnaeus’ students were so driven by this quest that they committed themselves to some of the most challenging, far ranging voyages of exploration of the Eighteenth Century (and about half of them died on these expeditions!). Theirs was not a sterile exercise, but a flesh and blood drive to see and know!