Wall Tigers
A fond memory of my undergraduate studies was a systematics class taught by the famed lepidopterist Arthur Shapiro. The Professor’s lectures were everything that I as a young student wanted out of my romantic imaginings of academe: lyrical, provocative, creative, and with a streak of eccentricity and a loving piousness to the universe. The taxonomy and naming of living things, the Professor intoned to us on that first day of class, is primordial to human consciousness. After all, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, one of the first acts in Genesis was the creation of the beasts and birds and humanity’s giving of their names, he noted.
“Binomial nomenclature” is a system of naming formalized by Swedish scholar Carl Linnaeus in 1753. You know this system in the English language through two-word combinations like Homo sapiens, Tyrannosaurus rex, Escherichia coli, or maybe even Cannabis sativa or Camellia sinensis. These examples are what we call “scientific names” or “technical names” in popular parlance. Each pairing serves as a unique name for a unique species.
In fact, the system is recognized beyond the English language: as European science became evangelized as the globally accepted (or imposed) framework for biological scholarship, the tradition of officially conjuring names for organisms using Latin became requisite. Each name would officially catalogue that lifeform within the halls of human knowledge and serve as its universal identifier. Felis catus was Felis catus regardless of what name you had for this creature in Hebrew, Vietnamese, or Russian. It reduced confusion through conformity.
Imbued with this Classical aura reflecting the Europeans’ own academe fantasies of ancient Greece and the Renaissance, these names offered a sense of mystery and mastery for many a budding naturalist — a connection to some seemingly deep tradition. The ability to rattle off tongue twisters like Megaptera novaeangliae or Onchorhynchus mykiss is akin to hushed passwords to an exclusive speakeasy, where utterances of “humpback whale” or “rainbow trout” would fall short of entry. And of course, the act of coining a new name was an honor unto itself — officially describing a species previously unknown to science — like some royal birth announcement. Or biblical act.
Binonomial nomenclature was a romantic institution, and I was one of those besotten budding naturalists. English may have been my second language as a child, but that didn’t stop me from memorizing Carcharodon carcharias or Tursiops truncatus. It undoubtedly steered me towards a zoology major and this very college course in systematics.
So it was an utter shock when one day in class, the Professor posited: Why have these arcane Latin names? Why not a use code of numbers to officially identify each lifeform?
I gasped, hearing heresy.
Twenty years later, students and scholars of natural history are being asked to take deep reflection, confronting the discipline’s problematic colonialist pasts and widening its perspectives beyond an aggressively dominant Western lens. Species whose scientific name were coined to honor known racists are now being called into question, along with the namers themselves.
And there is the matter of what exactly one means by a species “new to science” — new to whose science and whose hall of knowledge? What English-speaking Western scientists might finally proclaim (or doubt) as fact may well have been known to Indigenous peoples for tens of millennia. Indeed, Indigenous and traditional ecological knowledge (IEK/TEK) systems and non-Western cultures throughout the world have their very own taxonomy of naming organisms and describing their behavior or relationship within the local ecosystem. Among these truly deep traditions, some are sadly already lost, others being revived from near extinction; all finally getting their due attention.
Even the very notion of “species” has lost its Victorian sensibilities regarding evolution, that organisms were striving toward some ultimate essence of perfection. Really what we witness as a species — types of birds flocking over your head this autumn, or dinosaurs known only from fossil remains — are merely points along a line that has been extending and branching through planetary time. A snapshot of life everchanging.
But, being humans of a human mind, we like names and the act of naming. And the missionaries of European science have done their work. To this day, binomial nomenclature remains our standardized system of naming and renaming the dazzling complexity of species on planet Earth, past and present. Even with our ability to sequence entire genomes and perform supercomputer calculations, we still cling to these pairings of Latinized words. At least we’re having some fun with it.
So why not numbers? Why not Species #54132169435796 instead of Canis familiaris?
Later in the course, the Professor would give us each a Ziploc bag of non-living things — metal screws, nuts, and bolts — and asked us to scientifically name each of these “organisms” and to illustrate their evolution and relatedness into a phylogenetic tree. It was a clever project to assign as homework, one that I took to with great nerdy enthusiasm. I imagined why some bolts may have evolved to a larger diameter to adapt to changing environments or to fight off predators, and whether Phillips-head screws evolved from slot-head screws over the eons.
Thinking on these hardware parts today, I realize humans do have a numeric system for naming inanimate things: UPC’s — the Universal Product Code represented by the barcodes we see everywhere on product boxes and store shelf labels. It has all of the convenience but none of the satisfaction: 038000001109 might be a box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and 038000596582 might be a box of Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, but you don’t quite get a sense of the taxonomic relationship between those two products unless you knew what parts of a UPC matched up what type of information.
That said, if I put in front of you the names Nactus kunan and Nactus pelagicus, you would probably be equally lost. You might recognize “pelagicus” as something related to the ocean, and you might infer that the two organisms are somewhat related by the shared genus name, Nactus. I would have to additionally tell you that both are species of geckos. And if you didn’t know what a gecko was, I’d have to explain that it is a vernacular term for a category of lizards, first appearing in the English language in 1774, likely derived from some other language like Malay.
Funny enough, my native tongue has a wonderful word for geckos: wall tigers. From this literal translation, you still wouldn’t know that geckos are lizards — delicate, four-limbed things that lay eggs and like to shed their tails in moments of danger. But you might infer that they can be found on walls — and bearing the metaphorical temperament of tigers, which voraciously ambush and hunt their prey.
Where am I going with all this? I’m not quite sure. I do feel that imposing Latin binomials on a beautiful world of cultures and languages does increasingly come off as limiting and colonizing. I do know that naturalists and taxonomists are becoming more considerate in uplifting traditional cultural knowledge and non-English languages within their studies. There are even efforts to help communities and languages develop new words to create more access and ownership over scientific knowledge.
But whether we use Latin words or genomes or a universal numerical code to name and classify our fellow lifeforms, maybe the important thing is that we honor all the names and taxonomies — not just one system or one language. Humanity is as rich as its perspectives and contexts, and the human pursuit of natural history is no longer about imposing a sense of order and destiny upon wild unruly things, or one culture imposing conformity over all others. The joy of systematics should be about savoring this complexity, using all the ways we know how — something no combination of words, letters, or numbers by itself can offer.
