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The Fruit Fly Drosophila Gets a New Name
G3ckoG33k writes "The name of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster will change to Sophophora melangaster. The reason is that scientists have by now discovered some 2,000 species of the genus and it is becoming unmanageably large. Unfortunately, the 'type species' (the reference point of the genus), Drosophila funebris, is rather unrelated to the D. melanogaster, and ends up in a distant part of the relationship tree. However, geneticists have, according to Google Scholar, more than 300,000 scientific articles describing innumerable aspects of the species, and will have to learn the new name as well as remember the old. As expected, the name change has created an emotional (and practical) stir all over media. While name changes are frequent in science, as they describe new knowledge about relationships between species, these changes rarely hit economically relevant species, and when they do, people get upset."
The International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) ruling addressed a request to name D. melanogaster as the type species for the genus. Under the rules of nomenclature, another species in the genus has naming priority. As long as the genus (currently more than 1400 species) remains intact there is no name change for melanogaster. However, the biologist who submitted the petition to protect the name D. melanogaster did so because a revision and splitting of Drosophila is long overdue (and is apparently interested in taking on the project). The ICZN did not make this decision lightly, it has been under review for a couple of years.
As long as they're still known as fruit flies, changing the scientific name shouldn't cause too much confusion. Anybody who really needs to know will easily pick up on the fact that there are two scientific names and eventually the old name will become archaic.
Well the decision was not about Pluto, but over the definition of a planet. My lecturers told me the committee (or whatever) tried to push a definition that was fuzzy and would have made many now dwarf planets, planets. In a vote, the "people" as he referred to the astronomers, won and now we have a good definition of a planet.
Face it: We could never have 9 planets now. It would be 15 and rising (= a mess) or 8 forever.
Why should 1 body of 4 bodies of roughly equal size rotating around each other make the biggest one a planet?
The people upset in this case aren't the "lay people [who] get upset when the limited amount of science that they have been taught changes". It's the scientists that use fruit flies as research models because it will confuse the scientific literature. That is, the biologists are upset at the zoologists who classify the species.
This post was generated by a Cadre of Uber Monkeys for Monkey-Man2000 (603495).
Time flies when you're having fun. Fruit flies like a banana.
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BMO
Ironically, this song was written by the Four Lads not They might be Giants, which just goes to show how names and attribution are indeed lost to history.
Because when you think about it, the Meter is just as arbitrary as defining Pluto mass objects as the minimum size for planets.
Go ahead, look up the history of the Meter.
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BMO
and even that attribution is incorrect, because The Four Lads were just the first to record it. It was actually written by Jimmy Kennedy, with music by Nat Simon. Poor Jimmy Kennedy can't get no respect.
Which half? Seriously. It was the wrong skull on the wrong body, and both parts already had older names applied to them separately. Effectively, Brontosaurus never really existed except as a paleontological chimera.
But bananas can't fly.