*Warning! Rant follows. Hence much of the content is unabashedly subjective and probably ill-informed. Commentary welcome. Notification of shortcomings in argument welcome.*
The is the first part of a larger, largely unstructured rant whose components are only loosely connected, in that they highlight for me issues that arise from the actualisation/interface of the theory of the scientific method within/with cultural bodies/natural language (= scientific practice).
First up: use of the term "Man" as an official scientific label for people/humankind.
David Attenborough informs us in his 1979 opus "Life on Earth" that using the term "Man" to describe people is not sexist, it's merely the scientific word/term for our species. This assertion is false. The term scientific descriptor for our species takes the form of a Latin binomial (a two-part term), namely Homo sapiens. "Wise man" is an English translation of the binomial.
A few opening remarks on taxonomic names.Taxonomic names exist as labels, attached to type specimens of the species they represent. This type specimen tucked away in a repository somewhere is the content of the label, not the meaning of the words themselves. In a strict sense they are *not* intended to function as descriptors. If my theoretical identification of, say, the African elephant as a distinct species had been accepted and i, being struck by a mixture of whimsy and reverence had named the species Aenigma darwinianus , that would become the scientific name for the African Elephant. It translates as (BIG assumption - my Latin is correct!) "Darwin's enigma. This doesn't tell me anything about the quality of the species/stuffed critter. The fact that some scientific names are comprised of words that translate as descriptors (explicit or metaphorical) is a mnemonic bonus for those striving to learn them, and may be personally satisfying as a point of style, if like me that's your bag. As with place names i personally like the label to have some descriptive relevance and get highly turned off by boffins aggrandising themselves or their mentors.
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Loxodonta africana, the African bush elephant (probably). "African oblique-sided tooth" or "Oblique-sided tooth" for short are *not* scientific names for the species. |
Also important is that taxonomic names be unique (hence pan-cultural). Thanks to Linnaeus (the person who came up with the idea for the duel name system) and the cultural mores of his time, use of Latin is the convention for biological taxonomy. Common or colloquial names are also useful for communication but lack the specificity required for a scientific discussion. Depending on the cultural or sub-cultural context (sometimes related to physical geography, but not necessarily so) a single common name can be used for a range of distinct species or a single species can have a variety of different common names. Hence "Man" is not the scientific descriptor for people/humankind anymore than "男子, człowiek or emberiség" are. These translations function as common names. Perhaps common names used within specific cultural contexts (as with "Man" in the western scientific community during a particular period in time), but common names none the less.
And that could pretty much put an end to it as far as i'm concerned.
But wait.. there's more...
What may also be less apparent for those like myself not fluent or conversant in Latin, English and Mandarin, Czech or Polish and without access to a Mandarin-Latin, Latin-Mandarin dictionary, etc, is that the three words in the paragraph above are variously translations of the English words/concepts man, mankind and humankind, not the Latin word/concept Homo. To top it all off going back from "男子, człowiek or emberiség" to English may not produce the same words we started with. In translating them to Latin, Homo may not be the first choice to represent any of them.
There is a huge interpretive component to translation between natural languages, especially perhaps when dealing with rarely used and/or dead languages. How we translate words such as Homo with multiple nuances depends on context - in Roman/Latin discourse it may mean man (as in male human) *or* person - and involves choice which reflects our cultural preference. We chose to represent the contextualised meaning of Homo by the English word "Man" which speaks to the English speaking world's use of this word to represent all people (both sexes).
And still more...
Let's refer to the Label itself, then. I don't know if Linnaeus ever labeled taxa with latinised Classical Greek as some authors have, perhaps he was too much of a purest. But a derivative of the word άνθρωπος (anthropos) might have been a better choice (i.e. anthropology). Although it too was used to mean man as in "a male" this concept is more commonly referred to with ανήρ (aneer). άνθρωπος is more often used for labelling people overall. Maybe it was the same with Homo.
What this does highlights is the fact that Linnaeus, a member of a less-than female-positive, less-than egalitarian culture made a personal choice when he took it upon himself to label our species (this is complicated by the fact we don't (?) officially have a type specimen. Linnaeus himself has been designated, but i don't know if this is recognised as he isn't moldering away in a museum anywhere - so the label is content-less... but that's another tale). The words Homo sapiens cannot actually be found etched into our DNA anywhere. However, its useful for the purposes of rigorous discourse for our species to have a unique label and given that Latin is for all intents and purposes dead (= not strongly attached to concepts by most of the global populus), Homo sapiens currently seems like a relatively inoffensive choice.
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| How could you hate this fine (type?) specimen of Homo sapiens? Look at those eyes, Awwwww! It would be like kicking a chubby puppy! Carl Linnaeus in a 1775 portrait by Alexander Roslin (thanks wikipedia). |
Finally, I wish to speak up for conservatism in this instance. The authority and therefore rules for naming species in biology are not akin to physical constants we observe in the universe, they are invented and championed by a bunch of folks who take it upon themselves to police such matters. We can change/defy/ignore these/their (i ain't on your committee - you dudes are Other) rules if we want. My questions however are as follows: Why would we want to? and What would the consequences be? Sure, with growing numbers of women in the scientific community, and (hopefully) growing public investment in the scientific method from all human cultures, we all might want some sort of say in what such an significant label should be - especially when it was bestowed by what today would be considered (probably) a racist, misogynistic male with the comparative social-political awareness of an Orangutan. Consensus would however quite likely be impossible and not just in a global/spatial way. Consensus with those people who come after us would prove most problematic - we are hardly the paragon, the omega of human society and any label we chose may be offensive - or just down right silly - to a global culture-to-come. We could keep changing it up every so often but the system might become too unstable (if for Homo sapiens, why not for other taxa?) to be useful for the purpose it was created for and we would have communication=fail.
