What do George Cuvier, Charles Darwin, Frank Zappa, Darth Vader, and The Three Stooges all have in common? They – and a vast number of other people, both real and fictional – are the eponymous inspiration for the taxonomic names of a species somewhere on the planet. The stories behind some of these naming choices are as fascinating as others are entertaining, while still more are simply comical or even downright absurd.
While Juliet’s famous lines “What’s in a name? that which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet” are in practical sentiment quite correct, given that there are well over one hundred different species in the Genus Rosa, changing them around randomly without some sense of order and few ground-rules applied to the process would make things very confusing indeed.
While it is to be granted that the taxonomic classification and its associated rules of naming can be a bit convoluted when viewed from the outside, in all fairness it is positively Byzantine when viewed from the inside. Even so, it is certainly not random. Indeed, without it, and the centuries of work put to developing and refining its practices by some of humanity’s most inquisitive minds, it would be difficult if not wholly impossible to study the living world. The challenge is just how one new to it can come to gain an understanding of it and its practices in the first place.
Of all the books I’ve heard about as forthcoming in 2015, one of the most intriguing thus far has been John Wright’s “The Naming of the Shrew: A Curious History of Latin Names.”