By any other name...

Scientists have an undeserved reputation for being dry and humorless.

If you doubt the "undeserved" part, consider scientific names.  Because by convention scientific names usually have Greek or Latin roots, they sound pretty sophisticated and fancy -- until you translate them.  The adorable black-footed ferret of the American Rockies is Mustela nigripes, which translates to... "black-footed ferret."  The western diamondback rattlesnake, Crotalus atrox?  Greek for "scary noisemaker."  The name of the mammalian order containing shrews and moles, Eulipotyphla, is kind of insulting.  It means "really fat and blind."  But they only get sillier from there.  How about Eucritta melanolimnetes, a species of amphibian from the Carboniferous Period?  The name means "the real Creature from the Black Lagoon."

And the order of mammals that includes rabbits, Order Lagomorpha?  Translated from Greek, "Lagomorpha" literally means "it's shaped like a bunny."

The privilege of naming a newly-discovered species goes to the discoverer, and if they choose they can name it in honor of someone (it's considered bad form to name it after yourself).  Lots of biologists name species after their teachers or mentors, but the field is wide open.  Entomologists Kelly Miller and Quentin Wheeler named a species of slime-mold beetle after former Vice President Dick Cheney -- whether Agathidium cheneyi was an honor or an insult is open to interpretation.  Some paleontologists working in Madagascar liked to listen to music while they worked, and became convinced that whenever they played Dire Straits, they found lots of new fossils.  Thus, there's a species of Cretaceous dinosaur named Masiakasaurus knopfleri.  (Upon hearing about this, Mark Knopfler allegedly responded, "And people said I was a dinosaur before.")  A genus of carabid beetles, Agra, has a species named Agra schwartzeneggeri.  Terry Erwin, the entomologist responsible for that one, found a number of other Agra species, and thus we have Agra vation, Agra phobia, and Agra cadabra.

You can even name species after fictional characters.  Thus we have a fuzzy mite named Polemistus chewbacca, an Australian moth with marks that resemble a second head named Erechthias beeblebroxi, an Ordovician trilobite named Han solo, a sponge-like fungus from Malaysia named -- I shit you not -- Spongiforma squarepantsii, a cave-dwelling insect from Spain named Gollumjapyx smeagol, and -- my favorite -- a fish from the fjords of New Zealand named Fiordichthys slartibartfasti.

If you get why that last one is fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious, congratulations; you're as big a nerd as I am.

Some are just outright silly.  Consider the Australian wasp discovered by entomologist Arnold Menke in 1977.  He was so delighted at the find that he gave it the scientific name Aha ha.

And I would be remiss in not mentioning a genus of small mollusks named Bittium.  When a related genus of even smaller mollusks was discovered, they named it... you guessed it... Ittibittium.

The reason all this silliness comes up is a discovery that was the subject of a paper in PLOS-One.  Paleontologists working in Brazil found a fossil of a new species of tanystropheid, a group of Triassic dinosaurs with such bizarrely elongated necks that scientists are still trying to figure out how they walked without doing a face-plant.  (One possible answer is that they were aquatic, but that's not certain.)

Tanystropheus longobardicus, which is itself sort of a goofy name.  It means "long, bent thing with a long beard."  I have to wonder how many controlled substances the scientists had partaken of before they came up with that one.  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nobu Tamura email: nobu.tamura@yahoo.com http://spinops.blogspot.com/, Tanystropheus NT small, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Anyhow, the new species was christened Elessaurus gondwanoccidens.  The species name isn't so interesting -- it means "from western Gondwana," after one of the supercontinents around during the Triassic Period -- but the genus name is clever.  It plays on the usual -saurus (Greek for "lizard") ending of many genera of dinosaurs, but was actually named for Elessar, one of the many monikers of King Aragorn II from The Lord of the Rings.  Elessar, which means "elf-stone" in J. R. R. Tolkien's wonderful conlang Quenya, was the title Aragorn took after Sauron got his clocks cleaned by Frodo et al. and the former Strider became the King of Gondor.

So that's a look at the deadly serious, dry-as-dust subject of biological taxonomy.  And I haven't even gotten into the off-color ones, which is a whole subject in and of itself.  Suffice it to say that orchid is Greek for "testicle," and there's a mushroom with the scientific name Phallus impudicus ("shameless penis").  I'll leave you to research the rest of that topic on your own.

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Animalia paradoxa

Carl Linnaeus was born in Råshult, Sweden, on 23 May 1707.  His father Nils was the minister of the parish of Stenbrohult but was also an avid gardener, and the story goes that when Carl was young and got upset, Nils would bring him a flower and tell the little boy its name, and that always calmed him down.

The love of botany -- and of knowing the names of living things -- was to shape Carl Linnaeus's life.  Prior to his time, there was no systematic way of giving names to species; there were dozens of names in various languages for the same species, and sometimes several different names in the same language.  Additionally, the fact that this is before the recognition of the relatedness of all life meant that things were named simply by their superficial appearance, which may or may not indicate an underlying relationship.  We still have some leftovers from this haphazard practice, such as the various birds called buntings (from the Middle English buntynge, "small bird") that aren't necessarily related to each other.  (For example, the North American indigo bunting is in the cardinal family; the European pine bunting in the family Emberizidae.) 

Young Linnaeus was lucky enough not only to have supportive parents, but a variety of people who recognized his intellect and ability and nurtured him in his studies.  (Amongst them was the scientist and polymath Olof Celsius, whose nephew Anders gave us the Celsius temperature scale.)  He was primarily interested in botany, but quickly became frustrated with the fact that the same plant could have six different names in six different villages -- and worse still, it was impossible to communicate taxonomic information clearly to botanists in other countries, where the names would have come from their native language.

So he decided to do something about it.

Linnaeus came up with the idea of binomial nomenclature -- the "two-name naming system," more commonly called "scientific names."  Each species would be assigned a unique and unambiguous name made of the genus and species names, each derived from Latin or Greek (which were the common languages of science at the time).  The genus would include various related species.  His determinations of who was related to whom were based upon appearance -- this is long before genetics became the sine qua non of systematics -- and some of Linnaeus's classifications have been revised in the 250-odd years since he wrote his magnum opus, the Systema Naturae.  But even so, the system he created is the one we still use today.

And this is why scientists the world over will know, if you say Mustela nigripes, that you are talking about the black-footed ferret.  (The scientific name translates to... "black-footed ferret."  Just because they're fancy-sounding Latin and Greek words doesn't mean they're all that revelatory.)

So Linnaeus took the first steps toward ordering the natural world.  But what is less well-known is that he included a few animals in his book that are more than a little suspect -- and labeled them as such, illustrating an admirable dedication to honoring hard evidence as the touchstone for scientific understanding.

In a section called "Animalia paradoxa," Linnaeus listed some "species" that had been reported by others, but for which there was no clear evidence.  From the tone of his writing, it's obvious he was doubtful they existed at all, and was only including them to point out that any reports of them were based upon hearsay.  These included the following genera, along with his description of them:

• Hydra: "body of a snake, with two feet, seven necks and the same number of heads, lacking wings, preserved in Hamburg, similar to the description of the Hydra of the Apocalypse of St.John chapters 12 and 13.  And it is provided by very many as a true species of animal, but falsely.  Nature for itself and always the similar, never naturally makes multiple heads on one body.  Fraud and artifice, as we ourselves saw [on it] teeth of a weasel, different from teeth of an Amphibian [or reptile], easily detected."
• Monoceros: "Monoceros of the older [generations], body of a horse, feet of a 'wild animal,' horn straight, long, spirally twisted.  It is a figment of painters.  The Monodon of Artedi [= narwhal] has the same manner of horn, but the other parts of its body are very different."
• Satyrus: "Has a tail, hairy, bearded, with a manlike body, gesticulating much, very fallacious, is a species of monkey, if ever one has been seen."
• Borometz: "The Borometz or Scythian Lamb is reckoned with plants, and is similar to a lamb; whose stalk coming out of the ground enters an umbilicus; and the same is said to be provided with blood from by chance devouring wild animals.  But it is put together artificially from roots of American ferns. But naturally it is an allegorical description of an embryo of a sheep, as has all attributed data."
• Manticora: "Has the face of a decrepit old man, body of a lion, tail starred with sharp points."

A manticore, from Johannes Jonston's Historiae Naturalis (1650) [Image is in the Public Domain]

I've always admired Linnaeus -- like him, I've been fascinated with the names of things since I was little, and started out with plants -- but knowing about his commitment to avoid getting drawn into the superstition and credulity of his time makes me even more fond of him.  He was unafraid to call out the Animalia paradoxa as probable hoaxes, and that determination to follow the rules of scientific skepticism still guides taxonomists to this day.

Of course, sometimes there are some bizarre "forms most beautiful and most wonderful" in the natural world, to borrow a phrase from Darwin.  When the first taxidermied pelts and skeletons of the duck-billed platypus were sent from Australia back to England, many English scientists thought they were a prank -- that someone had stitched together the remains of various animals in an attempt to play a joke.  And once convinced that they were real, the first scientific name given to the platypus was...

... Ornithorhynchus ("bird-billed") paradoxa.

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By any other name...

Scientists have an undeserved reputation for being dry and humorless.

If you doubt the "undeserved" part, consider scientific names.  Because by convention scientific names usually have Greek or Latin roots, they sound pretty sophisticated and fancy -- until you translate them.  The adorable black-footed ferret of the American Rockies is Mustela nigripes, which translates to... "black-footed ferret."  The western diamondback rattlesnake, Crotalus atrox?  Greek for "scary noisemaker."  The name of the mammalian order containing shrews and moles, Eulipotyphla, is kind of insulting.  It means "really fat and blind."  But they only get sillier from there.  How about Eucritta melanolimnetes, a species of amphibian from the Carboniferous Period?  The name means "the real Creature from the Black Lagoon."

And the order of mammals that includes rabbits, Order Lagomorpha?  Translated from Greek, "Lagomorpha" literally means "shaped like a bunny."

The gift of naming a newly-discovered species goes to the discoverer, and if they choose they can name it in honor of someone (it's considered bad form to name it after yourself).  Lots of biologists name species after their teachers or mentors, but the field is wide open.  Entomologists Kelly Miller and Quentin Wheeler named a species of slime-mold beetle after former Vice President Dick Cheney -- whether Agathidium cheneyi was an honor or an insult is open to interpretation.  Some paleontologists working in Madagascar liked to listen to music while they worked, and became convinced that whenever they played Dire Straits, they found lots of new fossils.  Thus, there's a species of Cretaceous dinosaur named Masiakasaurus knopfleri.  A genus of carabid beetles, Agra, has a species named Agra schwartzeneggeri -- Terry Erwin, the entomologist responsible for that one, found a number of other Agra species, and thus we have Agra vation, Agra phobia, and Agra cadabra.

You can even name species after fictional characters.  Thus we have a fuzzy mite named Polemistus chewbacca, an Australian moth with marks that resemble a second head named Erechthias beeblebroxi, an Ordovician trilobite named Han solo, a sponge-like fungus from Malaysia named -- I shit you not -- Spongiforma squarepantsii, a cave-dwelling insect from Spain named Gollumjapyx smeagol, and -- my favorite -- a fish from the fjords of New Zealand named Fiordichthys slartibartfasti.

If you get why that last one is fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious, congratulations; you're as big a nerd as I am.

Some are just outright silly.  Consider the Australian wasp discovered by entomologist Arnold Menke in 1977.  He was so delighted at the find that he gave it the scientific name Aha ha.

And I would be remiss in not mentioning a genus of small mollusks named Bittium.  When a genus of even smaller mollusks was discovered, they named it... you guessed it... Ittibittium.

The reason all this silliness comes up is a discovery that was the subject of a paper last week in PLOS-ONE.  Paleontologists working in Brazil found a fossil of a new species of tanystropheid, a group of Triassic dinosaurs with such bizarrely elongated necks that scientists are still trying to figure out how they walked without doing a face-plant.  (One possible answer is that they were aquatic, but that's not certain.)

Tanystropheus longobardicus, which is itself sort of a goofy name. It means "long, bent thing with a long beard." I have to wonder how many controlled substances the scientists had partaken of before they came up with that one. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Nobu Tamura email:nobu.tamura@yahoo.com http://spinops.blogspot.com/, Tanystropheus NT small, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Anyhow, the new species was christened Elessaurus gondwanoccidens.  The species name isn't so interesting -- it means "from western Gondwana," after one of the supercontinents around during the Triassic Period -- but the genus name is clever.  It plays on the usual -saurus (Greek for "lizard") ending of many genera of dinosaurs, but was actually named for Elessar -- one of the many monikers of King Aragorn II from The Lord of the Rings.  Elessar, which means "elf-stone" in J. R. R. Tolkien's wonderful conlang Quenya, was the title Aragorn took after Sauron got his clocks cleaned by Frodo et al. and the former Strider became the King of Gondor.

So that's a look at the deadly serious, dry-as-dust subject of biological taxonomy.  And I haven't even gotten into the off-color ones, which is a whole subject in and of itself.  Suffice it to say that orchid is Greek for "testicle," and there's a mushroom with the scientific name Phallus impudicus ("shameless penis").  I'll leave you to research the rest of that topic on your own.

********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is brand new -- only published three weeks ago.  Neil Shubin, who became famous for his wonderful book on human evolution Your Inner Fish, has a fantastic new book out -- Some Assembly Required: Decoding Four Billion Years of Life, from Ancient Fossils to DNA.

Shubin's lucid prose makes for fascinating reading, as he takes you down the four-billion-year path from the first simple cells to the biodiversity of the modern Earth, wrapping in not only what we've discovered from the fossil record but the most recent innovations in DNA analysis that demonstrate our common ancestry with every other life form on the planet.  It's a wonderful survey of our current state of knowledge of evolutionary science, and will engage both scientist and layperson alike.  Get Shubin's latest -- and fasten your seatbelts for a wild ride through time.

Scientific names, Indigo Children, and Alpha Thinkers

Most people are, by nature, categorizers.  We like to put labels on things, sort the world into neat little boxes.  For many of us, this drive is integral to our understanding of the world.

An example from my own field is the concept of species.  The definition seems simple enough: a group of morphologically similar individuals that are capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring.  It seems, on the surface, that given this definition, it should be trivial to determine whether two individuals are, or are not, members of the same species.

The problem is, the world is messy, and doesn't often acquiesce to our desire to paste labels on various bits of it.  The word species is actually one of the hardest to pin down definitions in biology.  Ring species, fertile hybrids, morphologically distinct populations that can interbreed, morphologically identical populations that cannot, and so on, all point up that we're trying to draw firm distinctions in a realm where those distinctions probably don't exist.  As my long-ago vertebrate zoology professor once said, "The only reason that humans came up with the concept of 'species' is that Homo sapiens has no near relatives."

It's funny how serious taxonomists get about this, however.  There are fierce arguments over whether species should be "lumped" or "split" (particularly contentious amongst birdwatchers, who often bump up their lists with no hard work if what was once a single species gets divided into two or more).  There are endless arguments even about what names species should be given, and every month taxonomic oversight groups publish lists of name changes, to the chagrin of biologists who then have to go back and alter their records.

The same urge to divide a messy reality into neat compartments pervades a lot of other fields, too, and the results are sometimes more pernicious than the biologist's need to decide whether some plant or another is a new species.  In psychology, for example, it has driven the use of diagnostic labels on groups of behaviors that might not actually be conditions in the clinical sense.  ADD and ADHD, for example, are diagnoses that even the experts can't agree upon -- whether or not they are actual medical conditions, how (or if) cases should be medicated, and inconsistencies in how they are diagnosed have all led to significant controversy.  (There's a nice overview of the arguments here.)

Then, there's the urge to relabel in order to give a previously stigmatized group a more positive spin.  The adoption of the word "gay" to mean "homosexual" in the 20th century was, in part, to find a positive word to identify people who have throughout history been the targets of the worst sorts of epithets.  In the 1990s, a group of atheists tried the same kind of rebranding, and settled on calling themselves "The Brights" -- a move that to many people, including myself, seemed so self-congratulatory as to be cringeworthy.

More recently, there have been two rather interesting examples of this same sort of thing.  One is the idea of "Indigo Children," which is an increasingly popular label given to kids who are "empathetic, sensitive, intelligent, and don't fit in well."  I can understand the difficulties that parents of sensitive children face -- one of my own sons certainly could be described by those words, and he had a hell of a time making it through the teasing and bullying that seem to be an entrenched part of middle school culture.  But labeling these kids, even with a positive term, doesn't help the situation, and might even make it worse if the label makes the child feel even more different and isolated.  Add to that a pseudoscientific twist that you often see on "Indigo Child" websites -- that "Indigo Children" frequently have paranormal abilities -- and you have a fairly ugly combination of a non-evidence-based false diagnosis with a heaping helping of New-Agey condescension.  (For a particularly egregious example of this, go here -- and note that the article begins with a statement that the easiest way to identify "Indigo Children" is that they have "indigo-colored auras.")

Just yesterday, I found another good example of this -- the idea of the "Alpha Thinker."  Eric Schulke, who wrote the article I linked and who works for the "Movement for Indefinite Life Extension," tells us that Alpha Thinkers "... are creatives, innovators, pioneers. They acutely and agilely navigate an abundance of diverse, fallacy aware thinking. The alpha thinker can’t bring themselves to live at the last outpost and not venture further. They cannot resist poking their finger through the realm of subatomic particles. They can’t stay on this side of the atmosphere. They look into biology and the elements. They want to know why we are here, why the universe and all of existence is here, how far it goes, what is out there, what the hell is going on. Alpha thinkers are the universe’s way of creating the devises [sic] needed to help bring out all of the potential in its elements."

Well, that's just fine and dandy, but how do you know if someone is an "Alpha Thinker?"  It turns out that you more or less have to wait for them to do something smart:  "It is not a college degree that signifies the alpha thinker. As the alpha thinker knows, its [sic] an abundance of fallacy-aware thinking that signifies it...  Alpha thinkers control the elements. They are cosmic titans, the leaders of humankind, the explorers of the universe setting sail with fierce urgency."

Spinoza, Newton, and Thomas Paine, we are told, were "Alpha Thinkers," which strikes me as kind of an odd trio to choose, but I guess there's no denying these three men were bright guys.  Then, we are given two curious pieces of information: (1) whether or not you are an "Alpha Thinker" can be determined by an electroencephalogram; and (2) from "historical times" until now the ratio of "Alpha Thinkers" to ordinary folks has increased from 1 in 99 to 1 in 6.

So, I'm thinking: how can you know that's true, given that the EEG machine was only invented in 1924, and most people in the world will never have an EEG done during their lifetimes?  It seems to me that the label "Alpha Thinker" is just a new way to say "smart person," and Schulke is pulling made-up statistics out of his ass in order to support his point that there's something inherently different about them.  Further evidence of this comes at the end of the article, where Schulke gives the whole thing a New Age twist by saying that "Alpha Thinkers" are here to guide us into the next stage, the "Transhuman Revolution."

Oh, and of course, throughout the article Schulke makes it clear that he's an "Alpha Thinker."  As if there were any doubt of that.

So, there you are.  Today's musings about human nature.  I suspect that all of the above really, in the long haul, does minimal damage, with the possible exception of the misdiagnosis of individuals who are actually mentally ill and who don't receive treatment because they are labeled "Indigo Children" or "Alpha Thinkers," or whatever.  But it is a curious tendency, isn't it?  I think I'll wrap this up here, because I need to go update the database of my birdwatching sightings and see if any of the scientific names have changed.