August 29, 2003
by Helen Pearson
news@nature.com
You say tomato, I say Lycopersicon esculentum. You say potato, I say Solanum tuberosum. But Carl Linnaeus was the real plant buff.
Often called the father of classification, Swedish naturalist Linnaeus established the familiar dual Latin names by which all creatures are now known. This week, botanists met in Uppsala, Sweden to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the publication of this influential idea in his seminal 1753 book, Species Plantarum.
Before Linnaeus, people described living things in dialect or rambling paragraphs with little consistency. "Just about everything under the Sun was used," says Tod Stuessy of the University of Vienna, Austria, who led one of the Uppsala sessions.
In Species Plantarum, Linnaeus proposed that plants be christened first by the general group in which they fall, called a genus - such as pine or Pinus - followed by a unique species name, such as lambertiana. Two-word names had been used before, but Linnaeus is credited with their widespread introduction and standardization, partly because he collated, in the same tome, some 5,900 different plant species labelled in this way.
Ever since, the binomial system has helped scientists to classify and study the natural world. "It stuck with us over the years," says Gerry Moore of Brooklyn Botanic Garden, New York. Linnaeus' 1758 book Systema Naturae extended two-part titles to animals ? hence our own double-barrelled moniker, Homo sapiens.
Although Linnaeus' naming system in Species Plantarum was robust, his plant catalogue was not. Up to 420,000 different plant species may be growing on Earth, of which perhaps 80% have been found and named.
In the past few years, several ambitious projects have sprung up to try and complete this species inventory. Their organizers hope that such catalogues can help to identify regions of the greatest biodiversity on Earth, and hence those on which to focus conservation efforts.
One such endeavour is called Species 2000. Part of a larger initiative called the Catalogue of Life, it aims to link different species databases into a unified network by 2011. "If Linnaeus were alive he'd be very happy," says team member Yuri Roskov of the University of Reading, UK.
But producing such a comprehensive catalogue is a gargantuan problem because many plants have been identified and christened independently more than once. For example, the Index Kewensis, a species record held at Britain's Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, near London, lists more than a million Linnaean titles. And plants are going extinct before botanists can record their existence.
Uppsala delegates agreed that they need an umbrella organization to unite these disparate efforts. "The challenge is how to coordinate this," says Stuessy.
Although most botanists remain diehard fans of Linnaean nomenclature, the system does throw up a problem. When new research shifts a species from one group into another, it has to swap names to reflect its new position. Tomato, for example, can go under both Solanum lycopersicum and Lycopersicon esculentum.
“Shared characteristics do not necessarily reflect
plants' positions on the evolutionary tree.” |
Because of such problems, a renegade band of scientists wants to ditch Linnaeus' names for a system called the PhyloCode, which names organisms according to their evolutionary relationships. Linnaeus' scheme places organisms in groups based on shared characteristics that do not necessarily reflect their position on the evolutionary tree.
PhyloCode's advocates will gather in Paris in summer 2004 to thrash out the details and decide whether to approve its use. Meanwhile, Linnaean traditionalists fret that a new system will cause even more confusion.
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