Followed the link hoping to find at least a partial list of offensive plant names. Was greatly disappointed.
The Audobon Society recently started working on doing the same thing for birds. As with that, this is likely only changing the common names, not scientific names, as that is a much bigger deal since those are used worldwide by the science community.
To argue that changing the names is some big ordeal, these things already have a different name in every language anyway. Scientific names also get changed when necessary, especially now that DNA testing is prevalent. We learn things aren’t related to what we thought, and it changes what we know about evolution diversity, and taxonomy, which is a much bigger deal. Do you want updated scientific facts and names or is what you used to know from year ago good enough? Changing the informal name is no bigger of a deal than if a product changes brand names.
Some of the people these plants and animals named after are horrible people that exploited native people and their homelands with no regard to anything beyond their own personal fame. Graverobbers like Verreaux and racists like Blakiston didn’t discover anything, they cataloged it with a colonial power. Language evolves as we advance, and this is a natural part of our development as a society.
To see the reactions in the comments here is really disappointing for a science oriented community.
The Great Tit, the Woodcock, and the Blue Footed Booby are safe. It’s largely things named after some people that really don’t deserve to be remembered in a positive regard. Cornell and Audobon are both in favor of it, though Audobon has not committed to changing their name. Audobon traded slaves to help finance his work, hence the call to change the name.
[…] the minimal practical consequences of the changes.
So let’s invalidate all of the printed literature about those plants, and invite confusion because some delicate hearts got their panties in a twist over some words. Intelligence does not preclude monumental stupidity.
Your discovery only counts if you’re the kind of person we like sounds a hell of a lot like the Whitewashing that is usually agreed upon to be bad. How is this any better? History is full of people who don’t live up to modern standards on both sides. We just gonna pretend everything we don’t like never existed?
Ronald Dahl is now on a list because of some of how he describes children as fat or ugly and some other things. Ronald Dahl is a beautifully honest writer who tells children the way the world and parents often are.
Mark Twain has long been on lists because his characters accurately used the n-word to show endemic racism, discrimination and bigotry in Huck Finn. Twain’s writings probably had a bigger effect to reduce cultural acceptance of racism than any PHD of “non-offensiveness” could.
I’m as progressive as you can get but you’d think the liberals on the left would at some point start to refocus from political correctness that has diminishing returns to, you know, winning something important politically? The far right and far left meet in the middle on censorship.
Why? I’m pretty sure that plants don’t get offended, no matter what you call them…