I’m not sure if it’s good or bad, but I find the way species get named interesting.
The general rule is “first published name wins”, and this is true even if the first published name is “wrong” in some way, like implies a relationship that doesn’t exist, since that implication is not officially semantically meaningful. But there are ways to get around this, like if a name was based on a disproved phylogeny, in which case a new name can be taken up that fits the new phylogenic relationship. This means existing names get to stick, at least up until the time that they are proven so wrong that they must be replaced. Alas, there’s no official registry of these things, so it’s up to working researchers to do literature reviews and get the names right, and sometimes people get it wrong by accident and sometimes on purpose because they think an earlier naming is “invalid” for one reason or another and so only recognize a later naming. The result is pretty confusing and requires knowing a lot or doing a lot of research to realize that, for example, two species names might refer to the same species in different papers.
Thanks, I didn’t know. That matches what I expect from similar fields, though it is a bit disheartening. There’s an entire field of library science and taxonomy, but they seem rather isolated to specific things.
I’m not sure if it’s good or bad, but I find the way species get named interesting.
The general rule is “first published name wins”, and this is true even if the first published name is “wrong” in some way, like implies a relationship that doesn’t exist, since that implication is not officially semantically meaningful. But there are ways to get around this, like if a name was based on a disproved phylogeny, in which case a new name can be taken up that fits the new phylogenic relationship. This means existing names get to stick, at least up until the time that they are proven so wrong that they must be replaced. Alas, there’s no official registry of these things, so it’s up to working researchers to do literature reviews and get the names right, and sometimes people get it wrong by accident and sometimes on purpose because they think an earlier naming is “invalid” for one reason or another and so only recognize a later naming. The result is pretty confusing and requires knowing a lot or doing a lot of research to realize that, for example, two species names might refer to the same species in different papers.
Thanks, I didn’t know. That matches what I expect from similar fields, though it is a bit disheartening. There’s an entire field of library science and taxonomy, but they seem rather isolated to specific things.