From the University of Oxford’s Department of Biology, a new opportunity for ostentatious fretting:
The reality is that the use of eponyms in the naming of species poses a wider, more problematic nature. Traditionally, eponyms typically reflect benefactors, academics and officials affiliated with the individual who discovered a species – which is a practice that continues today. With science of the 19th and 20th century largely dominated by white men from colonising European nations, this meant many of those honoured are strongly associated with the negative legacy of imperialism, racism, and slavery.
A suitably concerned survey of the scientific names of African vertebrates revealed – presumably, to gasps and much rending of garments – that,
1,565 species of bird, reptiles, amphibians and mammals – around 24% of their sample – were eponyms, notably of white, male Europeans from the 19th and 20th centuries.
The rewards, I would guess, of doing the actual leg work, and of funding said leg work, resulting in, well, knowledge.
However, all this whiteness and maleness is, for some, terribly troubling. Among them, Associate Professor of Conservation Science, Ricardo Rocha:
Arguments against reforming biological nomenclature do not stand up to scrutiny.
Actually, and while I can claim no expertise, I’d guess that rewriting the entire scientific literature, in any number of countries, to alter thousands of obscure Latin names, which very few people know or remotely care about, in order to accommodate modern political fashion – which is what this is – might be rather impractical, somewhat confusing, and perhaps not the best use of limited resources.
Undeterred, our associate professor continues his tearful trajectory:
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