It’s absolutely disgusting to keep the name. It’s obvious of the face of it.
Anyone who wants to keep it needs to check their privilege. Absolutely shameful.
From Wikipedia
It was offensive when it was proposed you egregious piece of shit.
Below is the list of commissioners of the ICZN. Anything stand out to you?
https://www.iczn.org/about-the-iczn/commissioners/
A quick scan shows 22 white men, 3 Asian men, 2 white women. No people of African or Latin descent and no Jews.
I have no problem with changing species names as well as offensive popular names for animals and plants.
Horticulture will not suffer for the loss of the “wandering Jew”, a name based on an anti-Semitic legend.*
And I doubt there’s a great deal of cultural deprivation from referring to a fish as the Goliath grouper instead of its earlier name, Jewfish.
*Tradescantia works for me.
Even if it means the end of the Thagomizer all names without a descriptive or otherwise not scientifically based name should be consider invalid. And ICZN or any other such organization should not be itself deciding on the actual names only keeping track of names that provide scientific value and seeking to resolve conflicting names through consensus.
Why did it have to be a rare beetle - couldn’t it have been some thing more common and irritating, like a mosquito species, or bad gut bacteria? Let the neo-nazi morons waste their time and effort on something like that. Yeah, rename the beetle for it’s own good, and also some blue-green algae for these people to have a new target, but so that it’s useful to the rest of us, and keeps them busy.
I don’t understand. I would think that Neo-Nazis would be pleased that a beetle was named after their Fuhrer. Why are they killing them?
They love killing.
They are collecting them to display in a case. If you’re looking for logic behind this, you’re not going to find it.
Does that mean we can collect them and put them in a display case as well? 
Sure, it’s offensive, but also oddly appropriate…
Given that the species of beetle is obscure and almost no one has heard of it, I don’t see much difficulty with changing the scientific name or even common name.
If it were something far more prevalent, like the sparrow, housefly or earthworm, it would be tougher.
No, I hate this. Of course certain animals are subjectively unpleasant from a human perspective, but scientific names should not reinforce that parochial view by naming any species after the worst of humanity, any more than conservation of biodiversity should be narrowly focused on charismatic or cuddly species.
A species of cockroach was named to honor Douglas Adams - posthumously, but I think he would have been delighted.
This species is named in honor and fond remembrance of Douglas Adams, whose writing makes me laugh, and who loved and respected all life on this planet.
You appear to have taken my tongue-in-cheek joke seriously. Of course it’s a bad idea.
Poe’s Law strikes again!
So changing common names because they are offensive seems much more reasonable (even if getting everyone to use the new names is more challenging) a common name is not arbitrary, they are based on the attributes of the species in question (and are used every time you refer to that species), in this case you are saying “creature X is associated with group Y”, and if “group Y” is actually “racial slur identifying group Y” that’s bad.
Of course I didn’t take it as a serious proposal. But the underlying species prejudice is real (not you personally, just that we are all susceptible to it).
And fwiw I think the practice of tagging species of any kind with completely irrelevant human celebrities is almost as disrespectful as tagging them with the worst of humanity.
In this particular case, the Northern pikeminnow is a “trash” fish no one wants unless you are catching them for bounty (they love to eat salmon smolt and they will pay you to catch and keep). So, naming this fish the Squawfish is even more offensive.
There are Squaw peaks, Squaw Creek, etc that are being renamed as well, and while I am for this renaming, I don’t see the underlying named item to be thought of as a lower peak/creek/etc.
Yeah I’m fine with changing that (so future species are not named that way), though not for going back and changing the ones that are already in the wild (literally).
This thread reminds of an episode of Radiolab that was playing just this weekend (I think it was Radiolab… whatever OPB plays on Saturday evenings). The bit of the segment I heard discussed how body parts are often named after people, mostly white males, and this included female body parts such as the fallopian tubes (named after Gabriele Falloppio).
One of the hosts on the radio program said it was kind of like her body parts had been colonized by these names, which I thought was an interesting take.
Oddly, afaik, none are, In fact their scientific names have nothing to do with Darwin
. They are most commonly called Galapagos finches, and they probably arent actually finches- maybe more like tanagers… Darwin did collect them first, mind you.
Nor did Darwin use them or recognize them as an example of his theory. The name wasnt popular until 1947.
Only due to finding the species was mis named- such as there was an earlier description and name, or they have discovered (as with the Big Cats- once Felis now Panthera) etc. For scientific reasons only.
Which is why many of the names that were popularized like Eohippus- now Hyracotherium, and Brontosaurus, which was then called Apatosaurus, but then they found there really was a Bronto.
AFAIK, they have never changed a scientific name just to make it more PC.
Nope, Not in 1933. Hitler was even Times man of the year in 1938.
In 1933 most of the world admired Hitler. They voted to hold the Olympics in 1936 in Hitler’s Germany.
How can you tells a members religion by what they give you there? religions are not listed. And the brazilian member Paulo Lucinda is latino, Not to mention the member from Portugal- Luis M. P. Ceríaco, or from Argentina- Cristina Luisa Scioscia.
That would mean renaming hundreds of thousands of species. Many are obscure, such as this one. As a person who has his degree in the Life sciences, this idea is ridiculous.
Sure, but its real name is Ptychocheilus oregonensis . Its name is not “squawfish”, thats just what some people call it.
Who was the first person to scientifically describe it. That is how many body parts are named. Are you saying we should not honor that pioneering anatomist just becuase he is male?