Re: Stability of WG2

From: John Cowan (cowan@mercury.ccil.org)
Date: Tue Dec 16 2003 - 22:58:39 EST

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    Peter Kirk scripsit:

    > I'm no expert on this... but I thought that species could be transferred
    > from genus to genus as knowledge advances.

    True enough, but the specific epithet remains the same, and the old names
    are still "available" (as the jargon has it) though no longer "valid"
    (what I was calling "preferred" in my previous post). Linnaeus himself,
    working with two different descriptions of chimps, split them into
    Homo troglodytes and Simia satyrus (which latter also included bonobos
    and orangutans); when the mistake was cleared up, the specific epithet
    troglodytes, being the older, was retained for chimps, whereas bonobos
    got satyrus, both now in the new genus Pan; orangs were moved to Pongo
    and given the new epithet pygmaeus. (There's now a move underfoot to
    move all of these, plus gorillas, into Homo; I don't give it much chance,
    though I think it's a cool idea.)

    Nobody would call chimps Homo troglodytes, or orangs Simia satyrus,
    today, but those names can't ever be assigned to other species in future.
    (If chimps were folded into Homo, they would be H. troglodytes again.)

    > And presumably obvious
    > spelling mistakes are corrected (contrast "FHTORA" in U+1D0C5), or are
    > you saying that if the first publication had "Brontosuarus" as a typo
    > this error would remain for ever?

    It depends. If the article said "I dub this genus 'Brontosuarus', from
    the Greek for 'thunder lizard'", then yes, it would be fixed. But if
    there isn't a positive *indication in the text of the original article*
    that makes the error evident on its face, then 'Brontosuarus' it would be. 

    -- 
John Cowan  jcowan@reutershealth.com  www.reutershealth.com  www.ccil.org/~cowan
Big as a house, much bigger than a house, it looked to [Sam], a grey-clad
moving hill.  Fear and wonder, maybe, enlarged him in the hobbit's eyes,
but the Mumak of Harad was indeed a beast of vast bulk, and the like of him
does not walk now in Middle-earth; his kin that live still in latter days are
but memories of his girth and his majesty.  --"Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit"

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