Taxonomist’s revenge 21 Jun 2009 There’s a long and distinguished history of taxonomists taking revenge upon friends and enemies (sometimes simultaneously!) by naming unpleasant things after them. Linnaeus himself named an ugly useless weed after his major critic, Siegesbeck, who had attacked the “sexual system” of Linnaean botany. More recently, Quentin Wheeler named three types of slime beetles after the then President Bush, VP Cheney and architect of the Iraq war, Rumsfeld, although he swears it was an honour. Now, a San Francisco mycologist has named a stink horn fungus Phallus drewesii after friend and colleague Robert Drewes, a herpetologist, at the California Academy of Sciences. It’s shaped like a penis, droops and is two inches long, but Robert Drewes claims, at any rate, to be honoured: “It’s a wonderful honor and great fun to have this phallus-shaped fungus named after me,” says Drewes. “I have been immortalized in the scientific record.” All I can say is, never piss off a taxonomist, even in fun. Biology Humor Science Species and systematics Systematics
Humor The news just keeps getting better 10 Jun 2009 After learning that we can fly if we just put our minds to it, now comes news that Futurama is back! Must have something to do with Fox realising that in order to get audience, you can’t just bash the single most popular president since Grover Cleveland. Late note: I… Read More
Epistemology Is physicalism an impoverished metaphysics? 6 Oct 20146 Oct 2014 Every so often, we read about some philosopher or other form of public intellectual who makes the claim that a physicalist ontology – a world view in which only things that can be described in terms of physics are said to exist – is impoverished. That is, there are things… Read More
Book At last, a proper review of Fodor and Piatelli-Palmerini 3 Jul 2010 Peter Godfrey-Smith reviews What Darwin Got Wrong in the London Review of Books, and finally the review matches the book I am reading. PGS is usually right on everything, so read this one. It is critical, but doesn’t suppose that FAPP have made grade school level errors, like so many… Read More
Yet another reason not to use your real name on the net. But isn’t taxonomy also an instrument of praise? Surely something is amiss when there is no Biggus Dickus.
Is there some sort of dispute emerging in biology of late or have I been drinking too much Wilkins coffee? I did like the remarks on the Linnaen sexual system as repugnant and immoral. Delightfully stupid.
I don’t think it’s funny. You are a gifted academic and more than capable of winning an argument. We have a plant in Scotland called Stinking Billy in England it goes under the name of Sweet William named in honour of Prince William after his cold blooded murder of many Scots in the aftermath of Cullodin. Emotive folk taxonomies can be somewhat devisive and just keep bitter memories alive. They can also be subverted. I am sure we have all faced unreasoned responses to our views it’s unpleasant and I find at the moment in first writing up my own research that it is a bit unbalanced and one-sided. As I have a particular axe to grind which I think is perfectly correct; but I can’t allow the emotive part of a heated debate to have a place in my final results. It must be balanaced free of personal belief and emotion. In other words I have to learn to do science. I find it helpful to imagine I have Robert Boyle sitting on my shoulder when I write. What a guy! Although sometimes he slips off and I become all too human. But such are the creatures we are Mr Boyle was a rare thing.
An elderly friend of mine, author and illustrator of ‘Mushrooms of Western Canada’, once gave me a gift-card with one of her paintings. It prominently featured Phallus adrianus. I blushed, she didn’t.