The Art of Naming

by Michael Ohl

From Tyrannosaurus rex to Heteropoda davidbowie : scientific naming as a joyful and creative act. Tyrannosaurus rex . Homo sapiens . Heteropoda davidbowie . Behind each act of scientific naming is a story. In this entertaining and illuminating book, Michael Ohl considers scientific naming as a joyful and creative act. There are about 1.8 million discovered and named plant and animal species, and millions more still to be discovered. Naming is the necessary next step after discovery; it is through the naming of species that we perceive and understand nature. Ohl explains the process, with examples, anecdotes, and a wildly varied cast of characters. He describes the rules for scientific naming; the vernacular isn't adequate. These rules—in standard binomial nomenclature, the generic name followed by specific name—go back to Linnaeus; but they are open to idiosyncrasy and individual expression. A lizard is designated Barbaturex morrisoni (in honor of the Doors' Jim Morrison, the Lizard King); a member of the horsefly family Scaptia beyonceae . Ohl, a specialist in “winged things that sting,” confesses that among the many wasp species he has named is Ampulex dementor , after the dementors in the Harry Potter novels. Scientific names have also been deployed by scientists to insult other scientists, to make political statements, and as expressions of romantic “I shall name this beetle after my beloved wife.” The Art of Naming takes us on a surprising and fascinating journey, in the footsteps of the discoverers of species and the authors of names, into the nooks and crannies and drawers and cabinets of museums, and through the natural world of named and not-yet-named species.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Nature, Language, History Of Science, Environment, Natural History

312 pages, Hardcover

Published March 30, 2018

Reviews

[Rossdavidh · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you remember nothing else from this review, remember this: you can, for the price of a few thousand dollars (or euros or equivalent), get a species named after you. Probably an insect, but perhaps even a frog or an orchid.

How could this be, you ask? Well, mostly because you have no idea how many unnamed species there still are out there. Not only you have no idea, but actually to a certain degree even the scientific community doesn't. Oh, sure, they have SOME idea, but it's still subject to a great deal of uncertainty, not least because the number of unnamed species is still large.

The author of this book, Michael Ohl, has named a few species himself. For example, he named "Ampulex dementor", a type of wasp, and yes he did name it after the Dementors of the Harry Potter books. So, he knows whereof he writes, here. There is a lot of latitude in naming things, but there are also some rules, and behind most of those rules there is some history. In this book, you will get to read about a lot of it.

There was the competition between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh (they knew how to name people back in the 19th century) to discover and name as many dinosaur species as possible, the so-called 'Bone Wars', aka the 'Great Dinosaur Rush'. There was old Linnaeus himself, the fellow who more or less invented the business of giving scientific names, in Latin or Greek, to every type of living thing on the planet. There were a number of 19th and early 20th century obsessives, some of whom named thousands or even tens of thousands of species, mostly by going through the insect collections of various museums and universities. Even after discounting for erroneously re-named species, it still works out in some cases to more than a species a week, for their entire working life, and in some cases more like a species a day.

There are tricky questions, like what do we do if all we really have is the species name, and not much description except to say where the type specimen is (the actual example of this species that was first discovered), and that got destroyed by bombs in World War 2? Do we retire that name? Make our best guess as to which species it was talking about? Who decides?

There is the odd fact that, although these are official names, there wasn't ever really an official catalog of them all. Or rather, there were many, and they were not at all the same. There's the thorny question of whether or not the name has to be pronounceable. It turns out the answer is 'yes'. Well then, pronounceable by who? What if the Spanish or Japanese or English speakers have trouble with it, but everybody else in the world has no problem?

There is also rather a deep philosophical question at the heart of naming things: are these names real? Do they really mean anything? Is it all arbitrary? If you think too long about what it means to name something, you start to wonder if this is all just a collective hallucination, like fiat money or something.

Mostly what I got from reading this book, though, was a forceful reminder of the sheer mind-blowing abundance of nature. There are more species out there than I can ever know, and yet I could probably not name more than a few dozen of the plants and animals that I see around me in Austin. If your mind has no name for it, then it also has no place for it, and it tends to just slide past you like water off the back of a bird of the family Anatidae. I have recently tried to start learning the names of the various plants I see, and it makes details of the ditch and sidewalk and vacant lot spring out at me in a way that it did not before. To know the names for things, is to see them more readily, probably because before then they all had the same label, "weed". Now that I know my wild lettuce from my henbit deadnettle, I see more than I did.

But before anyone can learn the name, someone has to pick it. It's oddly satisfying to hear the stories of how that happens.

[Shyamal · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very nice read indeed. Especially enjoyed the story of the fake Nepal fleas and I independently learned about the Austrian tradition of Der Grubenhund

[Gwenaelle Vandendriessche · Rating 3 out of 5]

The names given to animals, plants and other organisms in my fieldguides is something I took for granted without giving it much thought. It was very interesting to think about the process needed before society actually adopted this naming. This books pictures some special or important authors of names which have been adopted or not...

[The Inquisitive Biologist · Rating 5 out of 5]

A surprisingly engaging book about the little-known world of taxonomical nomenclature. See my full review at https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2018...

[Bronwen Yoncak · Rating 4 out of 5]

This volume is jam-packed with interesting factoids and stories. Ohl gives us a sometimes-dense, usually-lighthearted, and ultimately entertaining foray into the world of nomenclature and etymology.

[Umayr · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps, in many places, the presentation could have been more precise. Perhaps the entire chapter titled "I Shall Name This Beetle After My Beloved Wife..." can be deleted without significant consequence. The book is still interesting for its long, anecdote-rich meditation on the connection between scientific names and biological entities. The connection is profound because language and scientific processes impose their own referential constraints even as the species problem grapples with defining and qualifying the ontological status of the category itself. The book, at the very least, hints at the many problems. Some of the best pages of the book tell the story of Walther Arndt, a zoologist and former curator of the Museum of Natural History in Berlin (where the author works). Arndt was a prolific publisher, an expert on sponges, and a pioneer on quantifying biodiversity, who was sentenced to death in Nazi Germany. It was a beautiful moment of self-reflection that shed light on history, science, and society at the same time.

[Alena]

I just could not get over the overuse of the word "linguistically" and the like: linguistic naming, the linguistic quality of the names, species names as basic linguistic labels, act of linguistically labeling, a linguistically minded ornithologist, linguistically challenging, which actually means something different than a linguist would think, …