Now they’re coming for plant names

The Pecksniffs, having tried to gain control over scientific names of animals but failing to do so—at least for the Latin binomials that scientists use when communicating with other scientists (e.g., Homo sapiens, Drosophila mauritiana)—are now coming for plant names. And not just common names, but, more important, the Latin binomials. The article below, by Banu Subramaniam, a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology and now a professor of women’s and gender studies at Wellesley College, takes a deep dive into the perfidy of botanical names, but also indicts the field for other abrogations of morality, like demonizing “invasive” plants and making us falsely think that sex is binary. (It is, as I’ve argued many times before.)

While Subramaniam has some good points, like criticizing “parachute science”, in which Western biologists take botanical samples from undeveloped countries without permission (this practice is now largely illegal and disappearing), in general the article, which summarizes her new book Botany of Empire, comes off as just one more performative attempt to reform a scientific field in a way whose effects are generally malign rather than good.

Click to read the Guardian article by Zoë Corbyn, which summarizes Subramaniam’s book:

An excerpt from the article:

Subramaniam is the author of the provocative new book, Botany of Empire. The book challenges plant science to better see the ways in which it has been profoundly shaped by European colonialism and how imperial attitudes, theories and practices endure. Colonialism and colonial logic remains “sedimented at every level”, argues Subramaniam, who also looks at what a more widespread and serious effort to “decolonise” might look like, even if such a project is never-ending. The book focuses on three subfields: taxonomy, plant reproductive biology and invasion biology (the science of the spread of introduced species).

1.) Names of plants can be bad. 

The attempt to change common names of animals that some find offensive, like Audubon’s warbler, doesn’t bother me too much. That’s because common names vary among cultures, and aren’t crucial for scientific communication in books and publications. But Latin binomials (Setophaga auduboni for the warbler) are crucial in scientific communication, and if they were changed, everything in botany would be messed up forever. That’s why the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, the official body for approving “scientific” names (Latin binomials) for animals has said that it will not change existing animal names, but that future names might take into consideration the person honored by the name.

Subramaniam, however, wants “offensive” scientific names of plants changed, though she doesn’t answer the crucial question: Who will decide what names are offensive?  After all, given that she’s proposing changing the scientific literature, she can’t possibly suggest that every plant named after a person be changed. That would cause confusion widespread beyond imagining in the botanical world. And that means that somebody has to decide what is “offensive.”

Her suggestion:

When Banu Subramaniam thinks about whether plants should be renamed so as not to honour white supremacist colonialists – Cecil Rhodes, for example, is commemorated in the names of 126 plant species – she contrasts it with how, for so many years in our patriarchal system, women were expected to change theirs. “That wasn’t considered complicated… and yet those in power give any number of reasons why this is,” says the professor of women’s and gender studies at Wellesley College, outside Boston, Massachusetts.

Here are three examples of offensive names given in the article, all of whose binomials involve the demonized Cecil Rhodes: Crotalaria rhodesiae, Cyphostemma rhodesiae and Coptosperma rhodesiacum. Interestingly, none of these seem to have common names with “Rhodes” in them; the last one’s common name, for example, is “butterspoon.”

More:

[Botany of Empire] enters the fray at a contentious moment. It is the International Botanical Congress (IBC) in Madrid in July and the so-called Nomenclature Section, responsible for the International Code that governs the scientific naming of plants, will be meeting to discuss and decide on a number of amendments that taxonomists have proposed since it last met seven years ago. Included is whether a mechanism should be added to the code so plant names that are regarded as culturally offensive or inappropriate can be rejected. If it passes the preliminary voting stage, it will be over to about 200 taxonomists who have individual votes along with the power to cast secret votes for their institutions.

Here’s one of the proposals in Taxon taken from the penultimate link above:

(121) Amend Art. 56.1 as follows (new text in bold)

“56.1. Any name that would cause a disadvantageous nomenclatural change (Art. 14.1) or that is regarded as culturally offensive or inappropriate (Art. 51.2) may be proposed for rejection. A name thus rejected, or its basionym if it has one, is placed on a list of nomina utique rejicienda (suppressed names, App. V). Along with each listed name, all names for which it is the basionym are similarly rejected, and none is to be used (see Rec. 50E.2).”

Again, who makes the decision? Presumably a committee, and I bet that if this happens they will choose an all-woke committee that will reject anybody who is morally impure. Would Darwin fall into that class?

But I object to the whole endeavor. There are two upsides, neither important, and one big downside.

The upsides are, first, the assumption that marginalized people have been put off botany or even driven out of the field by culturally offensive names. I don’t believe that at all, for I’ve seen no evidence of it.

The second “upside” is that it makes people like Subramaniam feel as if they are enacting social justice in the botanical realm. But that would be true only if the first upside were true, which it isn’t. Thus the second upside is a purely performative endeavor with no substantive effects.

The big downside, which I’ve mentioned, is that changing botanical binomials would throw the scientific literature into a tizzy. When you use a “new” name, do you still have to note what the former name was? That’s the only way to avoid confusion. And you’d have to do that forever, because the “offensive” name is already ensconced in the literature. And so this proposal does not get rid of the offensive name from the literature at all.

Going forward, however, you could still have a committee to eliminate proposed NEW names considered offensive. I’ll leave that endeavor to the Pecksniffs.

2.) Botany reinforces a false sex binary.  Subramaniam sees “colonial” botany as having distorted sex in plants, falsely implying that sex in plants is binary. But in fact it is binary, though plants have hermaphrodites, which combine male and female functions in one individual, far more often than do animals. But hermaphrodites are not a “third” sex, as their reproductive partners have reproductive systems that are either male or female. There are only two gametes: big, immotile female ones and small, motile male ones, even in hermaphrodites.

In the case of plant reproduction, Subramaniam draws on the work of historians of science who show how European colonial sexual norms based around heterosexual romance were transposed on to plants by Linnaeus. She argues that, as a result, our vocabulary and how we think about the way plants reproduce today “relies obsessively” on binary categories of male/female with their limited possibilities. Into this “impoverished” framework we try to shoehorn a breathtaking array of plant reproductive arrangements. More than 85% of flowering plants end up classified as “bisexual” or “hermaphrodite”, because the flowers have male and female parts; and that’s not to mention all the “asexual” ways flowering plants can propagate such as through roots, stems, leaves and buds. “There are more exceptions than rules,” says Subramaniam. “Plants do such interesting things… if we had better ways to describe them that aren’t based around human reproduction, it might open up other ways to study them.” (Subramaniam has published suggestions of new terminology and vocabulary.)

Being asexual is, of course, not a sex. It’s a way of cloning yourself, not reproducing sexually.  Below is the paper by Subramaniam and Bartlett that includes her suggestions; read it for yourself (it’s from Integrative and Comparative Biology) and check the glossary about how she wants to move away from a binary notion of sex into a spectrum. She also sees plants as being “queer”, which of course is a concept that applies to humans, not plants.  Here’s how plants can be “queer” (from the glossary):

Queer: is perhaps best described by Eve Sedgwick: “That’s one of the things that “queer” can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (Sedgwick 1993: 7).

If that has a definite meaning, I can’t parse it out. If plants are “queer” because they have hermaphrodites or reproduce asexually, then just use those two words instead of dragging in terms from human sexual preference.

But of course that importation of ideology into science is the real point of the article and book.  Here’s the author’s real point at the end:

[Subramaniam’s] takeaway message when it comes to plant science: “Botany, like everything, is political. Question received wisdom.”

Yep, everything is political, including my work on speciation in Drosophila. Right?

Click to read:

3.) The idea of “invasive plants” leads to xenophobia. Here we have another performative act with no evidence that the concept produces its touted salubrious results:

Meanwhile, when it comes to invasion biology, the good native/bad foreigner binary that has become so pervasive in how most people think about plants’ place in the world is deeply ironic. We seem to have forgotten that it was European colonialism that ushered in the “massive and grand reshuffling of global biota” that we see before us. That they are here, for good or bad, is a legacy of colonial botany. And most of our agricultural species are foreign, too, though we don’t hate them on our dinner plates.

Yet today we demonise non-native plants as evil and undesirable. Subramaniam worries this is helping to fuel xenophobia and giving us poor approaches to species conservation and management. Blame the plant and attention flips to violent eradication, which rarely works. Meanwhile the real problem, landscapes disturbed through overdevelopment (for it is often here that introduced species find their chance), takes a back seat. Former colonies’ promoting and protecting of native plants – essentially trying to return the environment to some kind of idyllic past state – while simultaneously showing so little regard for the Indigenous people who co-evolved with those flora and fauna, is a continuation of a colonial settler logic, suggests Subramaniam. “We need other logics for our approach to nature… not ideological litmus tests,” she says.

This is hyperbolic: we are worried about invasive plants because they can displace native ones, leading to extinction.  Subramaniam’s claim that the concept “fuels xenophobia” has not an iota of evidence behind it, as critic Dan Simberloff says later in the article:

Yet for Daniel Simberloff, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Tennessee, Subramaniam’s arguments, which he has encountered before, remain tortuous and unconvincing, and lack evidence. Not only does she “almost completely” ignore the impacts of many non-native species, but there is also scant proof that judgments about the aesthetics of non-native plants transfer to xenophobia. And approaches to restoration, which involve removing non-native species, aren’t so much about trying to return land to some unspoilt past but giving degraded ecosystems a fighting chance to recover. There are plenty of examples where campaigns to eradicate invasive non-native species have worked, he notes.

Responding to a recent study that found invasion biology research negatively frames non-native species, regardless of whether they cause harm, Simberloff and others in the field point out that the accumulating evidence is that substantial numbers of non-native species are going on to have a harmful impact. The rule of thumb used in the past – that only 1% of non-native species can be expected to become pests – is a “highly misleading low estimate” (though a new estimate is hard to give). Given that it isn’t always clear which non-native populations can “irrupt into invasion problems”, a precautionary principle, even if they seem benign, is prudent, they argue. They also point to a “formidable international scientific consensus” that non-native species pose threats, citing a sobering Invasive Alien Species Assessment published last September by an intergovernmental body representing 143 member countries.

I’ll quote one more critic: well-known botanist Sandra Knapp, who points out that botany is already scrutinizing itself and that Subramaniam is exaggerating ideas that, in some form, are already being tackled:

For Sandra Knapp, a taxonomist at the Natural History Museum and past president of the UK’s Linnean Society, the book provides an interesting perspective on botany but she questions some of Subramaniam’s characterisations.

While colonialists’ names do persist in plant names, it is a stretch to say the field is “celebrating” those people; big herbaria aren’t just confined to the global north, although there are more there; and “parachute science” is diminishing. One of the reasons botany used male and female when talking about plants’ pollen and ovule-bearing organs is because it made common understanding easier. “As plant scientists discover more about plant reproductive biology, they realise it kind of defies categorisation,” says Knapp, referring to a recent discovery about the sexual fluidity of an Australian bush tomato.

But, chiefly, Knapp questions the book’s starting point: that botany has its head in the sand over its colonial past. While botany isn’t a monolith, from Knapp’s perspective, the journey is under way: the field is actively engaged with thinking about and coming to terms with its past, as well as how it might create a more inclusive future. “There’s a blossoming of this discussion throughout botany now,” says Knapp. “It might not be the conversation [Subramaniam] thinks there should be, but that’s all the more reason to keep it going.”

Knapp points to a wealth of projects taking place at institutional and grassroots levels to amplify different voices: the Linnean Society’s addition to its library of portraits celebrating its first female fellows; a recent project by botanists to relay untold stories of individuals who collected and studied plants but who have been excluded from historical accounts; and work she has been undertaking with colleagues to produce a dataset of plant genera named after women.

Subramaniam is a good example of the maladaptive incursion of ideology into biology, an incursion that has virtually no upsides except for the good feeling it gives the Pecksniffs. Yes, parachute science is bad, but we realized that a long time ago, and now you need all kinds of permits to collect either animals or plants from different countries, particularly underdeveloped ones. But as for changing names or worrying about the name “invasive” or about whether plants are too “queer” to support a sex binary, that’s what’s called “pilpul” in Hebrew, referring to “casuistic hairsplitting” in analysis of the Talmud.

In the end, everything is political, so Subramaniam sees her endeavor as “good politics” that will enact social justice among vegetables.