Comment by chabska
14 hours ago
They spent a whole section glazing the Linnaeus system like it's a perfect thing, but as someone who has delved into taxonomy a lot (due to playing Metazooa and Metaflora), there are quite a few glaring issues with it.
1. political tussle. australian botanists managed to hijack the "acacia" name from the original African Acacia, to the totally unrelated australian plants that were also called acacia. I noticed that japanese botanists also have a habit of insular naming.
2. western bias. Names were given by the first white european man that "found" the plant, instead of the local inhabitants who have known and named the plants for thousands of years.
3. the eight rank taxonomy that only accidentally kinda work, but not really. The original ranks were domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Modern taxonomy only pays a glancing homage to this system, because the actual evolutionary path that we found out there doesn't care about this neat categorization system, and so we had to shoehorn in hacks in the form of sub-phylums, sub-classes, sub-sub-sub-families, and sub-species. We could probably come up with a better system using a tree coordinate system.
I don't think it's a real problem. It's a way that one group of humans agreed to label things, and that way is the currently dominant way. Even the agreed rules (whoever publishes first gets dibs on the name) are just an incentive for academics to publish. If there were another labelling system, it would have the same problems and would only serve to split the humans into multiple ways of doing the same thing.
But, ultimately, the naming is just for us humans. We care, the trees don't!
To quote Richard Feynman:
> The next Monday, when the fathers were all back at work, we kids were playing in a field. One kid says to me, “See that bird? What kind of bird is that?” I said, “I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is.” He says, “It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn’t teach you anything!” But it was the opposite. He had already taught me: “See that bird?” he says. “It’s a Spencer’s warbler.” (I knew he didn’t know the real name.) “Well, in Italian, it’s a Chutto Lapittida. In Portuguese, it’s a Bom da Peida. In Chinese, it’s a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese, it’s a Katano Tekeda. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing—that’s what counts.” (I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.)
Also, a tree coordinate system? We can't even be certain what a tree is, we can only look at a particular species and put it somewhere on a tree-bush continuum.
This diagram is insane: we have trees with non-tree ancestors, and non-trees with tree ancestors!
https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th...
I didn't mean a literal tree that has leaves and bark. I meant the tree structure that you get when you trace the ancestry of all organisms. A tree coordinate system would assign a number to every node, so instead of saying Tectona grandis, you say 2.44.32.543.45.33 . If that looks like IP address to you, yes, an IP address is actually a tree coordinate system.
> If there were another labelling system, it would have the same problems and would only serve to split the humans into multiple ways of doing the same thing.
If that were true, then you’re saying Linnaeus has the same problems as before it, and it only split people up? Maybe we should go back to the previous names? Of course the system could be improved and solve some problems, the relevant questions aren’t whether it’s possible, they’re about goals, scale, and agreement.
Feynman’s quote is cute but doesn’t seem completely relevant to a hierarchical taxonomic naming system that in fact does tell you something about what a bird is from the name, no?
Feynman's quote is distinguishing knowledge of the thing itself (e.g. its behaviour, properties) which he thinks is useful, from ontological knowledge (naming and categorising) which he cares less about. As a physicist he only had to remember 61 particle names and 4 force names :)
That's not to downplay giving things names! Obviously it's essential to get any collaborative work done that everyone uses the same name when they mean the same thing.
On applying my logic back to the introduction of the binomial naming system... very clever! But I think it was Linnaeus's peers liked the properties of binomial naming so much it had a unifying effect on them... and now they have unity, and there are many more scientists worldwide depending on this system to communicate, they don't need a challenger system to provide a different form of unity?
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What specifically makes these issues, much less glaring issues?
>We could probably come up with a better system using a tree coordinate system.
I'd suggest having ones that count from origin, and other that count from present, so the current extant species would be +1, LUCA would be -1.
Eukaryot? count from origin, Beagle? Count from present.
> Names were given by the first white european man that "found" the plant, instead of the local inhabitants who have known and named the plants for thousands of years.
I see this brought up often in all sorts of contexts. It's the "if a tree falls in the woods and no one's around" thing. If some indigenous group with no writing system nor contact with the rest of the world has a name for something... does it really have a name or even exist in the global sense since no one else can be made aware of it?
> nor contact with the rest of the world has a name for something
Almost everywhere that white Europeans went and named things, they did so with native guides that had names for things.
Many of the Australian plants and animals named with European taxonomies still have common native names and aboriginals alive, kicking, and somewhat traditional that still use older native namings.
eg: (IIRC) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7h9V4aKlJw