Stability of names...

[Anne Kilmer]

The question is, who is to be the master? What are names for? 
The hysterical power struggle between lumpers and splitters is funnier
than some of our disagreements, but it does leave a litter of ruined
names behind. 
Alas for the brontosaurus, and all those other beasts whose names exist
only on cereal boxes. 
Alas for the flowers whose names on the seed packets (vinca, geranium,
chrysanthemum) are hollow ghosts of the scientific names that once
proudly waved ... 
What I wish is that you would, having lumped them back together, also
put the names back the way we learned them. For I am not as bendy and
stretchy as once I was, and I am not about to learn new names for
everything. 
Catharanthes rosea. Sheeesh. 

Suddenly I realize ... it is all a conspiracy of the taxonomists, in the
pay of a) Big Business and b) the conservationist com-symp Green Party
types. The latter, of course, are splitting like mad, hoping to find new
species which can be declared endangered, if possible in downtown
Manhattan. The former are lumping, and hope to convince the public that
if one butterfly (the Monarch, of course) is thriving, then the
environment is not in trouble. 

Well, I hope it is making you all very rich. 
Anne Kilmer
South Florida 
"Alain wants the foie gras wrapped in parchment ... the most expensive
squabs, strangled. 
-- New York

Michael Gochfeld wrote:
> 
> Well in response to Doug and Chris and Myself it sounds like we
> shouldn't worry our pretty little heads over the name changes. We manage
> to learn them and life goes on. It's better than the Toxicology journals
> where they occasionally refer to "the rat" and "the mouse" (and who
> knows maybe even to "the bird" and "the monkey".
> 
> We should bask in our superiority complex (or what's left of it). After
> all to the molecular biologists the whole organism is just a
> contaminant.
> 
> Mike Gochfeld
> 
> ================================================
> Michael Gochfeld, MD, PhD
> Professor of Environmental and Community Medicine
> UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and
> Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute
> 170 Frelinghuysen Road
> Piscataway, NJ 08854  USA
> 732-445-0123 X627  fax 732-445-0130