Re: A Pet Peeve and Need Identification Help

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----- Original Message -----

From: Lon J. Rombough

To: Garden Writers -- GWL -- The Garden Writers Forum

Sent: Wednesday, June 25, 2003 1:09 PM

Subject: Re: [GWL] A Pet Peeve and Need Identification Help

My own personal quandry over scientific names is in wondering why some are changed.  Sometimes there are good reasons, such as DNA testing or the like showing that a plant is more closely related to another group of plants than the one it had been placed in.  In some cases, the change seems so arbitrary as to make no sense, or at least is of such a small value that the confusion over the new name offsets anything gained.  
   In my own interest, grapes, I've seen two cases of renaming that illustrate this.  One was in moving the muscadine grapes into a new genus.  That one made sense as the species has a different number of chromosomes from all other grapes.  In another case, a species named after the discoverer was given a "descriptive" name, from Vitis longii (Col. Long's grape) to V. acerifolia (Maple leaf grape).  The latter name doesn't fit all that well and it discards the historical value of the previous name.  
   In the long run, as new people come along and get used to the new names, it probably won't matter, but it now outdates all previous books and articles and will cause confusion in anyone who uses the older references.
   Perhaps there is an article in all this - giving the old and new names of plants and the story behind the change.  
-Lon Rombough

There are occasional articles in Natural History and similar magazines and
journals by people like my late heroes Isaac Asimov and Stephen Jay Gould that
try to explain that science is not about certainty, but the search to
understand.  Karl Linne saw the need to organize the things he wanted to understand.  
We are beginning to reorganize some of his patterns, but it is still about
searching and testing.  I had little exposure to different cultures until 35 years
ago.  I knew a little bit of scientific Latin, but had zero awareness of how
many common names could be hung over the same plant and nobody wants to change
their practices.

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