The Dangerfield Effect

Taxonomy and nomenclature get no respect

“I don’t get no respect” —Rodney Dangerfield

Rodney Dangerfield, 1972. Source: Wikipedia.

If you’re like me, you miss Rodney Dangerfield and the endless ways in which he got no respect.  It’s unfortunate that taxonomy—a science rich in theories, history and the excitement of exploration, deeply intellectually challenging and rewarding, and creating the foundation for understanding the living world—is mistaken for a rote activity aimed at merely recognizing species… a myth being reinforced by the popularity of DNA barcoding.  Among all taxonomic activities, perhaps the one most misunderstood and disrespected is nomenclature: the rules, practices and conventions, honed over time, that make scientific names informative, stable and reliable.  The codes of nomenclature may appear unbending, nit-picking and legalistic, but they serve science extremely well.  Currently, details and implications of codes are being reconsidered in light of developments from electronic publications to possibilities created by informatics.

Because respect for nomenclatural rules rests primarily with taxonomists, editors of biological journals sometimes fail to fully appreciate the importance of upholding them.  A lack of respect for nomenclature has played an important part in creating taxonomic confusion.  Simple things, like documenting the date of publication of a new species, can become pivotal in determining the correct name to use.  In the past, editors have sometimes allowed discrepancies between indicated and actual dates of publication. Because nomenclature works so well, it is usually invisible to general biologists. But when something goes wrong, or when a species name must be changed to adhere to the rules, biologists cry out in agony over the inconvenience of learning a new name.  Occasional corrections of names, however, is a cheap price to pay for such a dependable system. Without respect for the rules (which include provisions for rare exceptions), we would slide immediately into the kind of chaos that existed before the codes.  A time when species could be renamed at whim, and different names were used for the same species in various countries.  It would be difficult to communicate about kinds of organisms precisely or compare research results; and hopelessly challenging to locate all relevant literature.

My recent book, Species, Science and Society, was published earlier this year.  Yet, the date of publication printed in the front of the book is 2024.  I like to think that my book will have some measure of relevance in the future, but such predating is misleading.  I called this out in the page proofs as a mistake, but was informed by the editor that this is the publisher’s standard practice.  For a book that contains no nomenclatural acts, this inaccurate dating is likely to be no more than a mild irritation to librarians, historians, and sticklers for facts. Someone could read my book today, plagiarize a bit of content, hurry to press, and, for those in the future seeking to give credit where due, rob me of intellectual property.  My book is an impassioned rant about, and love letter to, systematic biology, written at a time when the science is under attack, so I welcome all voices willing to speak up in its defense, even plagiarists.  But there are times when dates of publication are more consequential.  The degree to which we credit historical figures like Darwin, Wallace and Lamarck with conceptions of evolution depends very much on when their ideas were made public.  But this has mostly to do with properly assigning credit and has little day to day practical impact for most of us.

Scientific names are another matter.  One of the bedrock principles of nomenclature is priority: the scientific name published first is to be accepted over subsequently proposed names for the same species, so long as it followed the established rules.  This creates an objective basis for choosing among multiple names for the same species, and it appeals to our sense of fair play by giving credit to the first person to have formally recognized a species (or higher taxon).  When dates of publication are not respected by editors, when they are ambiguous or not even printed, it creates a dilemma for biological nomenclature, the principle of priority and the stability of names upon which we rely. 

A recent paper by Thierry Frétey in Bionomina illustrates the mess left in the wake of sloppy practices.  It is a detailed analysis of new taxa named in the Bulletin de la Société zoologique de France between 1876 and 2015. Of 3,953 new scientific names in the journal, no fewer than 1,224 (31%) appeared in print after the ostensible year of the journal publication.  The paper examines information pertaining to this journal, including pagination and dates of publication (known or estimated by explicit criteria), and provides a summary of conclusions regarding dates of establishment of names, frequently at odds with dates printed in the Bulletin.  These names affect a wide diversity of taxa, from bacteria to mites, fungi, and birds, among many others.

As we evolve deeper into the digital age, we have an opportunity to avoid such mistakes.  Mandatory registration of nomenclatural acts with ZooBank or the International Plant Names Index (IPNI), for example, can eliminate the laborious task of searching out every publication and assure that act(s) are immediately known and accessible.  With such authoritative sources, editors could assure that correct scientific names are being used in articles and, in exchange, see that authors of primary taxonomic literature are acknowledged each time scientific names are used in publications, anchoring names to sources and metadata, and compensating for citation indices that fail to deal with taxonomic literature that may have little immediate impact, but a shelf life measured in centuries.

In glaring irony, Frétey’s paper, that is a meticulous record of printed, actual and estimated dates, has a lapsus calami in its own title—involving a date.  The journal in question began publication in 1876, but a misprint in the title indicates that it was 1816!  Confident that this was an unfortunate error, I nonetheless cannot help but entertain the possibility that it could have been a clever way of reinforcing the primary point of the article that, in nomenclature, dates really do matter!

Acknowledgment

I thank my esteemed colleague Alain Dubois for calling the article, hot off the press, to my attention.

Reference

Frétey, Tierry. 2023. The publication dates of the printed issues of the Bulletin de la Société zoologique de France ([1876]-2015).  Bionomina 33: 1-162.