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."

Comments

Re:No surprise

[bmo]

Last things first:

All multiple bodies rotate around a center of mass that is never in the center of the largest body, be it the Earth-Moon system, or the Jupiter system.

Your 4 body problem is not even rejected as per the definition, so it's a red herring.

Number of planets? Since when does that matter? Where is the maximum number of planets in the definition?

The "people" voted? Seriously? You're seriously saying this? Out of 2700 attendees, all but 5 percent had left by the time the vote came up. Never mind that the membership of the IAU that actually attends the congresses is a small minority.

You know what might have made sense? Making Eris the 10th planet. All other KBO/TNOs are smaller than both Pluto and Eris. Using Pluto's mass as the minimum mass for classification would have solved the problem of "infinite" KBOs being classified as planets.

--
BMO

Re:Backwards compatibility

[TaoPhoenix]

Drosophilia melanogaster nomenclature 1.0 was conceived in the 1930's by Johann Wilhelm Meigen.

Drosophilia melanogaster 2.0, for use in genetic science, was developed by Charles W. Woodworth and Thomas Hunt Morgan.

Fruit Fly 3.0, Sophophora melanogaster, (note the summary is missing an o, a syntax error), is a major and backwards-incompatible release after a long period of testing.

Some features have been backported to Fruit Fly 2.6, which is a different fly from the Tephritidae family that poses economic crop problems in Australia.

Works Cited:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drosophila_melanogaster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language)
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/04/10/0519202