Scientific Names are Tricky
Scientific names are tricky, slippery, argument inspiring things. There are even taxonomic vandals! Or, they are beautiful data-based hypotheses about how we view the diversity of life on Earth. Among biologists, or anybody who thinks about these things, scientific names could be grouped with religion and politics as something polite society should not discuss. The late herpetologist Karl Schmidt expressed the emotional paradox when he wrote in his preface to a book on scientific names,
“Finally, in the full realization that an individual editor would be exposed to bitter criticism alike for what he did and did not do, I was moved to undertake this labor, which, however vulnerable, has not been without love.”
I was the chair of the Standard English and Scientific Names Committee for the Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles (SSAR) for just over 20 years and from my experience, Karl Schmidt was right on the money. The bitter criticism certainly came with the job, but philosophically I treated it as you can’t please all the people all of the time. So, I preferred to think of the positive side of scientific names: they are indeed beautiful hypotheses about the diversity of life on earth.
Scientific names are beautiful because they reflect the amazing diversity of life. In one of my favorite usages of the word “beautiful,” Darwin used it towards the end of the last sentence in his book The Origin of Species, “…from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
However, my other descriptor is the most important: hypothesis. Why, you ask? Because our recognition of species is dependent upon scientific inquiry and evidence. Really, I should say “our discovery,” because I believe species are not arbitrary but exist without the need for us to say they do, i.e. they are real. As such, try as we might, we get those discoveries wrong sometimes and the hypothesis about a species can be rejected, with the consequence being name changes.
The dreaded name changes. By gosh man, why can’t we just leave those names alone?! Why is there no stability?! The reason is, well, because they are hypotheses and, like any other hypotheses in science, they are subject to peer review and change as new data and evidence dictates. With new and enormous amounts of genetic data from genomes, methods of analysis, and increased sampling of individual organisms there is no reason to expect stability in names. In fact, if we did decide stability was reached then we would no longer be doing science. The famous philosopher of science Karl Popper put it this way,
“The game of science is, in principle, without end. He who decides one day that scientific statements do not call for any further test and that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game.”
The upshot? Names will continue to change.
So how does the SSAR names committee decide on these name changes?
Before I answer that question, I want to briefly review the history of these names lists, at least for North American reptiles and amphibians. The first attempt was in 1875 and it was followed up in 1882. The interesting thing about the 1882 list is that the author included English or common names to the scientific names. Five more lists were coauthored by two workers and were published from 1917 to 1943. Schmidt, quoted above, published his version in 1953. Three years later, nine coauthors produced a list that added English names to all the species.
SSAR took over the names business and published four editions between 1978 and 1997, with the first two having four and six coauthors and the last two with a single author. I mention the number of authors on these lists because, correctly or not (I think mostly not), some users saw the lists less as scholarly documents and more as personal choices. With that thinking, heated debate ensued and changes were sought. That is where I stepped in.
I accepted the unenviable position of the SSAR names list chair and banked on my ideas to work, meaning less contention, where others did not. My idea was to create subcommittees of specialists for each taxonomic group and let them vet the research and make decisions about names.
There were subcommittees dedicated to salamanders, frogs, lizards, snakes, turtles and introduced species. An alternative model could have been to just get any group of reptile and amphibian biologists to work on this, regardless if they knew anything about the group or the research that required vetting. To me, that was akin to asking my gardener to work on my car and perhaps rewire a section of my house while they were at it.
The other thing we did was actually write annotations to explain the decisions we made regarding names. I thought the transparency, coupled with experts, would remove a lot of the contention and debate. Well, that did not happen. I did have a lot of positive feedback and debate that improved the list over the years (we published four volumes between 2000 and 2017), but Schmidt was still right. We tried, but of course being humans we still made mistakes. And some people apparently would rather have their gardener work on their car.
Regardless, as a biased observer I think the Names Committee has done fantastic work, as fine a job as could be expected in the wild contentious world of scientific names.
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