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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."
Is it only in software we care about backwards compatiblity? This new name change will break thousands of studies which now references a fly does not exist. Journalists with only a fleeting aquantaince to biology will be confused about Drosophila melanogaster and its new name which leads to worse science reporting. This seems like gratitious breakage, where if an analysis was made the costs would be found much higher than the benefits.
Football Odds
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.
And you are using a bad example because you appear to be completely unaware that the reclassification of Pluto was because of a political pissing contest at the IAU.
You know how legislatures approve unpopular bills in the dead of night on a Friday at the end of the session? That's exactly what happened there. But not only that, they waited for most attendees to go home. Scientifically minded people like me were aghast at the shenanigans.
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BMO
"It was very difficult for the commissioners," says Ellinor Michel, the commission's executive secretary. "It was a question of celebrity, as everyone knows D. melanogaster."
That would certainly be awkward...if we lose Drosophila melanogaster, the only full binomial I will know from memory will be Homo sapiens. I'll have to memorize the name Caenorhabditis (of C. elegans fame) or something, and that will truly be a tragedy.
Sophophora was Drosophila
Now it's Sophophora, not Drosophila
Not been a long time gone, Drosophila
Now it's bug filled time on a moonlit night
Every fly that was Drosophila
Lives in Sophophora, not Drosophila
So if you had a fly in Drosophila
It'll be waiting in Sophophora
Even old pluto, was once a planet
Why they changed it I can't say
People didn't like it better that way
So take me back to Drosophila
No, you can't go back to Drosophila
Been a long time gone, Drosophila
Why did Drosophila get the works?
That's nobody's business but the Scientists
Sophophora (Sophophora)
Sophophora (Sophophora)
Even old pluto, was once a planet
Why they changed it I can't say
People didn't like it better that way
Sophophora was Drosophila
Now it's Sophophora, not Drosophila
Not been a long time gone, Drosophila
Why did Drosophila get the works?
That's nobody's business but the Scientists
So take me back to Drosophila
No, you can't go back to Drosophila
Been a long time gone, Drosophila
Why did Drosophila get the works?
That's nobody's business but the scientists
Sophophora
(with apologies to They Might Be Giants)
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Ryan Fenton
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).
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.
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BMO
The best fruit fly trap is a bottle with a little bit of red wine left in it. The little buggers are crazy after the stuff, get in and can't escape. We used wine traps in the lab to hold the escaped fruit flies in check. Of course, you gotta renew the trap every couple of days...
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
1. All definitions are essentially arbitrary at some point.
2. All the other named KBOs are big enough to be round by gravity
3. If we make Ceres a planet, then we have to make the KBOs planets too.
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BMO
Translation: "I was on the losing side of this debate, so I'm bitching about the process."
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
At least the popular name is staying the same. I'd hate it if they ruined my favorite entomological pun: "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Time flies when you're having fun. Fruit flies like a banana.
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BMO
It's still Brontosaurus to me.
It wasn't the the number of species in the genus that prompted this. It was the genetic analysis of those species that revealed that they were not as closely related as people thought.
Using Pluto's mass as the minimum mass for classification would have solved the problem of "infinite" KBOs being classified as planets.
Why? It's arbitrary. It's right up there with making a unit of measurement based upon the length of some King's lower appendage. Frankly, I thought we were attempting to move past that with things like the metric system.
It happens in microbiology a lot. Pastuerella pestis became Yersinia pestis ... Bubonic Plague remained the same, and the old studies are still valid. How hard is it to set up a table of equivalents where Yersinia = Pasteurella
Botany has been systematically reclassifying plants by their genome, moving dozens of species, eliminating others.
Why should zoology be immune to change?
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
... feels better, now.
To hijack your argument:
A useful classification system will group like with like. Earth at .3% of Jupiter's mass is very much unlike Jupiter. When you consider that Mars and Venus are 11% and 82% of the mass of Earth, it's clear that Earth is much more like them than it is like Jupiter.
Yet all are planets.
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BMO
Or because it is the species used in experiments, which are mined for data (bloated up to "wisdom" in the namers' mind).
I can!
Any planet-like bodies that are Pluto-sized or larger are "Planets."
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Good point. And since Jupiter's mass ratio to the Sun is close to what Earth's is to Jupiter, I think we should just call Jupiter "a really crappy star."
Or maybe for classifying celestial objects it's not the size of the body, it's the motion of the fundamental forces ;)
Eris is larger than Pluto, so your solution doesn't solve the problem the GP was asking about.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Jeff Goldblum :(
From a biologist's point of view, one kind of fruit fly is (broadly speaking) pretty much the same as the next.
This is one of the most breathtakingly wrong statements I think I've ever read on Slashdot. And that's quite a trick to pull off. Um, congratulations, I guess.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
{sigh}
And "Informative"? Really?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
This is standard operating procedure for systematics and has been for a century or so. It happens all the time. International codes spell out exactly how it all works. Systematists have agreed long ago that this is the way it should be and scientists take it in stride. These scientific names are created and managed to meet specific needs of working scientists. It should be of no more consequence to nonspecialists than changing "cycles per second" to "Hz" or "carbonic acid" to "carbon dioxide" or changes in IUPAC rules.
The horseshoe crab was Limulus polyphemus, then Xiphosura polyphemus, then Limulus polyphemus again.
In 1962 Theodore Savory wrote, in Naming the Living World: "The second belief, apparently held by many, is that a change of name is a serious, almost a catastrophic occurrence, but in everyday life outside the lab this is simply not true; and a biologist may be reminded that both his mother and his wife have survived the same metamorphosis. The third fallacy is that the possession by an organism of two or three [different scientific] names imposes upon biologists that it is beyond their capacities to carry. This could be true only if zoologists, for example, were expected or needed to be familiar with every animal, whereas nearly all active zoologists today are either physiologists, who do not seem to care about nomenclature, or specialists concerned with only one group, large or small but essentially limited."
The scientific names of organisms serve a number of functions. One is to be sure that scientists working worldwide know what organism is being referred to, and avoiding problems with common names such as "daddy long-legs" or "nightingale..." or, for that matter, "fruit fly" which describes at least two different families of insect.
Another is to reflect the systematic relationships of species as best known. As knowledge evolves, names evolve.
Biologists agreed on the best way to handle this long ago. It's not at all analogous to Pluto. There are less than ten planets, and there are over a million species of animals and plants. If you think scientists can get all of them right and never change any of them, think again.
If you write a scientific paper, you have a choice: call it Sophophora melanogaster or Drosophila melanogaster. If you call it Drosophila, likely someone will insist on correcting it, but maybe not. Either way it is not going to be a problem and is not going to cause "chaos in the literature" because everyone who knows the species by its scientific name will know about the change. Nobody is going to get confused. Automated searches will get cross-references just like card catalog did.
And if you're not doing professional science, just go on calling them "fruit flies." Just like "Baltimore orioles."
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