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
Cognition Analytic thinking, religion and science – the rhetoric and the psychology 5 May 20125 May 2012 Over the past few decades there has been an increasingly large literature on styles of thinking and cognitive biases (to which I am grateful to Jocelyn Stoller, a reader of this blog, for introducing me) in psychology, culminating in the marvellous book, which I recommend to everyone, by Daniel Kahneman, Thinking… Read More
Biology Fame in Brazil 23 May 2009 A paper of mine on microbial species concepts, which started life on ET1 and hence you’ll be able to find on this edition of the blog, has been quoted in Portuguese in a Brazilian magazine, Pesquisa FAPESP. Can fame and fortune in that worthy nation be far behind? Read More
Humor Avatar plotline 17 Jan 2010 is best summed up as Dances with Smurfahontas in Fern Gully For example… And now, the Metacontextual Edition (warning! Major plot spoilers, and I mean that in the most literal way). 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.