In article ,
Broadback writes:
|
| Using Latin names is confusing enough for me, but why do they so often
| seem to change plant names?

Fundamentalist dogma.

Seriously. There was an agreement on how to slected a particular name
if several authors had used different ones for the same species, or if
what were two species turned out to be variants of one. Fine. All
well and good, but the (botanical) religious ferverts got the upper
hand over the (horticultural) pragmatists and turned a sound rule into
a Holy Doctrine.

There is a pragmatic rule for genera, which is very necessary to avoid
generic names changing every time someone discovers a mouldering paper
to the Botanical Society of Novosibirsk in 1800. But there is no such
rule for specific names, which is why we get abominations like Viburnum
farreri - which is STILL called V. fragrans in horticulture, quite
reasonably. This interacts with the ongoing war between the 'splitters'
and 'clumpers' religious sects, because they need to fiddle the names
every time they reshuffle the species.

All right, that's the jaundiced viewpoint, and you can can equally well
spin the same facts into a 'best effort' solution to an intractable
problem, handicapped by reactionary and carping ignoramuses :-)

The root cause is that, as Oscar Wilde said, the truth is rarely pure
and never simple. And dividing even the higher plants into species
is most definitely a truth of that form! So all schemes will be
unsatisfactory, and arbitrary rules are needed but absolute ones will
always get individual cases wrong. It IS an intractable problem.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.