What's in a Name? In Science, a Lot

Shakespeare famously asked the question about what’s in a name. In science, the answer is: “A lot”. That sounds so wrong: after all, isn’t science a “wholly objective pursuit that allows us to understand the world through the lens of neutral empiricism”, as Ed Yong puts it. And yet…

Take the term “dark matter”, used for the common type of matter in the universe, one very different from the stuff we see/feel/are made of ourselves. The problem with the name? Lisa Randall explains in Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs:

“We see dark things, which absorb light, and because the ominous-sounding label makes it sound more potent and negative than it actually is. Dark matter is not dark – it is transparent.”

Svante Pääbo made the same point of the problems with naming in his excellent book, Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes:

“It has a tendency to elicit scientific debates that have no resolution. For example, if researchers refer to Neanderthals as “Homo neanderthalenis”, they indicate that they regard them as a separate species… If researchers say “Homo sapiens neanderthalenis”, they indicate that they see them as a subspecies.”

Even worse:

“Once a name is in taxonomic literature, it cannot be withdrawn later.”

Ok, you say, the layman may get misled by the inappropriate names but scientists wouldn’t, right? Wrong, writes Yong. Look no further than (drumbeats) lichens:

“They look like plants or fungi, and for the longest time, biologists thought that they were.”

For almost 150 years, this has been the text book definition of lichen:

“The lichen is an organism created by symbiosis. It forms only when its two partners meet.”

Then in recent times, scientists found that some lichens harbored a second fungus. This was a game changer, as Sarah Watkinson noted:

“The findings overthrow the two-organism paradigm… Textbook definitions of lichens may have to be revised.”

And then it began to look like there might even be “third, fourth, or whatever-th symbiont” in the mix!

Toby Spribille puts the danger with names and definitions perfectly:

“Language matters a lot when dealing with these organisms… If we set up our language so that our definition of a lichen is fixed, and these other elements are extrinsic, we’re setting ourselves up to find that they’re extrinsic.”

To see how far our understanding has changed, I’ll quote Anne Pringle:

“Lichens are ecosystems as well as organisms.”