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As much as the authors would want to honor people that were important for them. Is their privilege as discoverers to choose a name.
Carl Thunberg 1743-1828 was a Swedois called the father of the South African botanic. His work studying African and Japanese plants was huge. If his name is in 250 species is because he did a huge effort to advance zoology and botany. He did enough merits and helped enough people to deserve the honor to be remembered. Science is all about being a meritocracy for the benefit of the humanity.
I'm pretty sure you knew both of these things when you wrote your comment too, so I'm struggling to understand what is going on here.
Maybe you should rephrase as like "I don't mind a little racial slurring, it adds spice to science" or something? "It keeps us grounded in the scientific tradition of personal naming of species, and the racism is an acceptable cost for it" would at least be honest.
> Yellow-flowered shrubs called Hibbertia, after anti-abolitionist George Hibbert, are one plant group that some botanists would like to rename.
It's so easy to be against slavery when living in a society where everyone is against slavery (Edit: people aren't black and white, I think it's great that we remember the names of "imperfect" people; it shows humility, open-mindedness, tolerance of viewpoints we may not agree with, etc.). Regarding slurs:
> One of the proposals aims to rename an estimated 218 species whose scientific names are based on the word caffra and various derivatives — which are ethnic slurs often used against Black people in southern Africa — and to replace it with derivatives of ‘afr’ to instead recognize Africa
So, it's a very "local" slur: "caffra" sounds adorable to me. Reminiscent of the "coq"[0] story (which means "roaster" in French).
As for your personal aesthetic feelings about specific slurs I don't find them interesting, useful or compelling at all. I frankly cannot even guess what you thought that was adding to this conversation.
I think the idea that humans are multifaceted is important, along with the idea that someone could be both racist and make scientific contributions in another.
Humans and history are complex, and I think this is a coordinated effort to strip that complexity reality away.
That what is a slur to some is absolutely benign to others (what else in this context).
> Everyone is imperfect, but there's nothing sacrosanct about this naming tradition, or any particular name emerging from it
By that logic, we could as well have left the name untouched, as the new name wouldn't be unchangeable either. I really couldn't care less either way, but spending time and money on such petty things feels like a waste of resources to me.
But I think scientists overall are probably smart enough to handle whatever complication is added to their work by it. And again, they must already be able to account for changes for other reasons, so I trust they can make it through this one as well. It's just not a compelling technical argument.
I'm not "in favor of racist names", that's a disgraceful shortcut. I do think that:
- there are way more important issues;
- "racist names" are not so trivial to identify ([0] is an amusing example)
- even if we could identify and remove all racist names, it probably won't solve the actual issue (racial "hate" of various degrees).
> an apparently unpopular position on this website
It's important to understand that there are legitimate arguments against the removal of "racist names". The intentions behind removing them may be quite good, it doesn't mean that
(1) it's a good thing ("the road to hell is paved with good intentions");
(2) and even if it's a truly good thing, it doesn't mean not doing it is necessarily bad either.
Note that its work the other way as well: it's not because it's a bad thing that it's necessarily a bad thing for it to happen. And that's why, despite the fact that I think that it's an unwise choice, I still do not care about it happening: it may have a very positive role in the long-run, and I can't see that far.
> It's just not a compelling technical argument.
Note that it's not the argument I was making at all, as I'm not well-placed enough to have an opinion on this particular matter. It seems that we had a botanist in the thread making this argument thought.
[0]: https://www.digmandarin.com/confusing-chinese-n-word.html
Not unless you memorize every single change first. This is not a trivial task and the trend of AI to invent facts could made it an impossible one in a few decades so is not a trivial problem.
Realizing that the species are the same can seem easy for popular well known species, but not all species are popular, and often several species share the same name for a while. Sometimes people forgets about a species that is depicted only in a particular article from 1800, but to know that your new species is really new you need to trace the original work.
I can tell you by experience that untangle this lines can became a hell real quick.
The burden that this move will put on the shoulders of overworking researchers will have an impact on the time available to new botanists to do science. This means a humongous number of lost hours of research work, when we need science focusing on rare species most.
Anything that delay advances of science, or will made the life of scientists even more miserable, should be dismissed or done by universal consensus on the scientific world, and much better justified. Period
Saying that "But this guy that studied this butterflies all this life, had slaves in 1810 so their name must be bleached from historical documents" will not harm slave owners.
It will harm --me-- and other people like me, and will harm the conservative efforts done on the species, sometimes even leading that organism to extinction. There are known cases.
Erasing parts of the history or bleaching names in a book is a road to totalitarian hell. Egyptians did it before. It just will block researchers in the future to know the truth or to understand the historical facts.
*are
And no, they're not.