Botanists vote to remove racist reference from plants’ scientific names

Scientists have voted to eliminate the names of certain plants that are deemed to be racially offensive. The decision to remove a label that contains such a slur was taken last week after a gruelling six-day session attended by more than 100 researchers, as part of the International Botanical Congress, which officially opens on Sunday in Madrid.

“This is an absolutely monumental first step in addressing an issue that has become a real problem in botany and also in other biological sciences,” she told the Observer. “It is a very important start.”

https://www.theguardian.com/science...ove-racist-references-plants-scientific-names

 

Interesting one! Wasn't expecting anything like this to be approved. Not fully clear from the Guardian article, but looks like it is being done by treating the word as a spelling error correctable to affra, so authorship, date of publication, priority, typification, etc., are not affected.

 

For that they would have needed to change the (holy) Code, which includes an article (60) that explicitly says that only grammatical and typographical errors are to be corrected (e.g. a plant named after a woman but the original species name ending on "-ii", which is the masculin singular genetive, must be corrected to "-iae"; Roman "v" used as "u", non-standard Latin letters used in the original publication) but not spelling errors.

But the (sub)commission can have a vote on changing a name on a case-to-case basis, which is what happened here at the IBC, the Int. Bot. Congress (there's an entire part and day dedictated to taxonony, naming, issues). Such a vote will than supercede the regulations of the Code, once it is formally published.

That's why it's for now only "... caffra" will be changed to "... affra", rather than a general clean-up. Already that was probably a huge struggle. Taxonomy is like stratigraphy, very conservative. There is quite a bunch (valid names and synonyms that have to be listed in a taxonomic revision) that will be affected by this vote.

And then there's the problem of double names. Hence the change to ... affra and not ... africana (Latin for "African") or ... africanense (Latin for "from Africa"). Since "affra" has no meaning in Latin (or Greek, or any other language; when we publish a new species name, we have to give the ethymological reason), no one ever published a plant species under this name (the IPNI list is pretty comprehensive). Plus the new species name is phonetically very similar to the old one, which is crucial for practical purposes.

 

Thanks! What about caffrum, is that also being changed to affrum?

 

Yes. The according proposal #126 (they are typically published in Taxon) to add a new exception-from-the-rule paragraph in Article 61 included all endings and spelling variants (with 1 or 2 f, and with or without e).

Gideon F. Smith & Estrela Figueiredo
(126) Proposal to add a new Article 61.6
to permanently and retroactively eliminate epithets
with the root caf[e]r- or caff[e]r- from
the nomenclature of algae, fungi and plants
Taxon 70:  1395-1396. 2021

If the proposal was accepted as is, also the double-fs will go.

 

Thanks!

Interesting, the Guardian got it wrong, the example cited becomes Erythrina afra, not Erythrina affra as they said.