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From Scientific Spite to Political Pettiness
A history of petulant, childish, and otherwise silly renamings
Let’s start with a classic tale of a friendship ruined by professional jealousy.
In the early 1700s, Carl Linnaeus, the creator of our modern system of binomial nomenclature (i.e., homo sapiens), was pals with another scientist named Johann Georg Siegesbeck. They were both botanists in northern Europe and they exchanged letters from time to time. But, as Linnaeus developed his system for classifying plants, Siegesbeck became outraged.
Siegesbeck’s main problem with Linnaeus comcerned sex. As professor William Ashworth explains, Linnaeus had developed a “sexual system” for naming plants:
He decided to group the plants into a number of different classes, depending on how many stamens there were in the flower. To divide the classes into orders, he relied on the number of pistils in the male flower. The plant classes had names like Monandria (one stamen), Diandria (two stamens), Triandria (three stamens), etc. The orders were named Monogynia (one pistil), Digynia (two pistils), and so forth.
This was all, Ashworth contends, kind of arbitrary, but it made it easy for scientists to classify new species.
