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In message , Nick Maclaren
writes 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. There is a pragmatic rule for species as well, if you're talking about conservation of widely used names over earlier published names. For example Adansonia gregori (the Australian baobab) is conserved over Adansonia gibbosa, and Luehea speciosa over Luehea alternifolia. One other cause of name changes is embracing of the principle of monophyly by taxonomists, combined with new data from DNA sequencing. (The whole of Cactaceae is nested in one genus of Portulacaceae, but this is 'fixed' by splitting that genus - not by the joking suggestion to sink all several thousand species of cacti into that genus; and all other genera of Cactaceae into the genus Perevskia - I haven't seen a proposed solution for this. Data is not always unambiguous, so botanists tend to be conservative about changing generic circumscriptions - waiting until the data is clear.) There's problems in the pipeline with Hibiscus, and even with generic circumscriptions between Malva, Lavatera and Althaea. 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. -- Stewart Robert Hinsley |
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