02 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Taxonomy as Colonial Imperialism
Coleridge pointed to this difference between an organising taxonomy and a dynamic scientific principle or law in essays in The Friend (1819). The psychology of collecting, ordering and naming specimens could also be seen as a form of mental colonising and empire-building. ‘Taxonomy after all, is a form of imperialism. During the nineteenth century, when British naval surveys were flooding London with specimens to be classified, inserting them in their proper niches in the Linnaean hierarchy...British scientists renaming species that were already named by the native inhabitants of the colonies as a form of oppression.
20 SEP 2011 by ideonexus
Taxonomies are Not Arbitrary, but Factual
Mayr lived exactly 100 years, producing a stream of books and papers
up to the day of his death. Among these was his 1963 classic, Animal
Species and Evolution, the very book that made me want to study evolution.
In it Mayr recounted a striking fact. When he totaled up the names
that the natives of New Guinea’s Arfak Mountains applied to local birds,
he found that they recognized 136 different types. Western zoologists,
using traditional methods of taxonomy, recognized 137 species. In other...Example of the natives of an island having nearly the same number of classifications of birds as the taxonomists who studies the species.
19 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
The Unimaginative Naming of an Ancestor
Raymond Dart, then, gave the name Australopithecus to the Taung Child, the type specimen
of the genus, and we have been stuck with this depressingly unimaginative name for our ancestor
ever since. It simply means 'southern ape'. Nothing to do with Australia, which just means 'southern
country'. You'd think Dart might have thought of a more imaginative name for such an important
genus. He might even have guessed that other members of the genus would later be discovered
north of the equator.
S...The name for Australopithecus is non-descriptive and unfortunate.