What's in a name? Why scientific names are important

Scientists are somewhat notorious for being pernickety and nit-picking about details and always want to be as exact and specific as possible, or when they can't be, to couch their words with the right levels of "probablys", "maybes" and "almost certainlys". It's part of the culture to avoid ambiguity when subtle differences in language or a badly chosen word can change the implications of a sentence quite notably. For example we'll tend to avoid saying something like "this is significantly bigger than that" as "significant" has implications for an actual statistical test when in fact we simply been "much bigger". Palaeontologists in particular try to avoid the word "while" as it has temporal connotations that may not be intended (though it's a trap I fall into almost constantly).

However much of this can easily bypass a non-researcher and indeed plenty of researchers too on occasion, and it's all too easy to use an ill chosen word if you don't think carefully, and especially when in conversation rather than writing a technical paper. In any case it may be clear what is meant and despite the unintended ambiguity, the intended meaning may be obvious. However, there's at least one area where using the right term is absolutely unambiguous and any other can be problematic and that's the use of scientific names.

Everyone is familiar with at least a few of these, even if they don't realise it. Homo sapiens, Tyrannosaurus rex, Boa constrictor and Geranium arboreum are all likely recognisable no matter how limited your biological knowledge. You might well know these as "Latin names" and while many are in Latin, there are those in Ancient Greek, Aztec, Mongolian, Xhosa and others and thus the general preference these days is to call them "scientific names".

As I've done above, these should be in italics (or underlined when handwritten) with the generic name having a capital and the species name none. These can be abbreviated with an initial or two for convenience such as T. rex but every other form, even if italicised, (t rex, T rex, T-rex, tyrannosaurus rex, Tyrannosaurs Rex and others) is incorrect. Higher groups get a capital but no italics, and informal versions have neither. Thus Tyrannosaurus is a member of the Tyrannosauridae, but the vernacular for the latter would be tyrannosaurids, not Tyrannosaurids.

All of this may seem overly nitpicky, but there is a good reason for this. Plenty of names are all but identical, or even actually identical, in English or indeed other modern languages and the scientific name and the word in another context may have different meanings (like Homo, Turbo, Boa, Fluke). The correct use of italics therefore eliminates any ambiguity. And so we come to the bigger issue – the use of common names.

There's nothing inherently wrong with them – I don't know anyone in the UK who would be stumped by my talking about blue tits, foxes or oak trees but these are things with just one commonly used name in the UK. Take a look at the cat up top. Is that a puma, cougar, catamount, panther, painter or mountain lion? Depending on where you live in North America, any or all of these are correct. Add into that local names from all the Latin countries and languages of the First Nations and the list of names grows still higher.

But what it is to a biologist is Puma concolor and nothing else. It crosses all linguistic barriers, and brooks no ambiguity. It's both a convenience and provides clarity. For all that I can see it might seem unimportant or unnecessarily detailed there is good reason for it, as with any other scientific convention such as H₂O or cm³.

Just to soapbox a little, it's a simple enough system really, though one that far too few science writers seem to grasp and I do find it odd that other scientific conventions are used correctly, but that the names for species (or for that matter genes) are overlooked. It's a pretty basic part of biology and one that I did in school aged about 10, so I find it hard to understand why is it so rarely used correctly. I remember writing to one major UK daily after a write up of a piece of my research to moan about its misuse and was told that, against all reason, it was apparently part of their standard format to italicise species names, but not generic ones. So it's not that they couldn't typeset italics or didn't know the correct format, but had actively chosen to use an incorrect one. At the risk of making too much of something too little, it is representative of at least some reporting of science that something can be written that is knowingly incorrect.

That at least should cover the very basics of the correct use of scientific names. Inherent in this, however, which I have yet to go into, is the creation of those names themselves. And that, I'll be dealing with in the next post.