Creek Running North

The topic is a couple months old, but I only just found this little nugget yesterday:

Changing the name of the brontosaurus had to be one of the stupidest things scientists have done. It’s not like the Jesse Jackson of dinosaurs held a press conference and demanded the name be changed or anything semi-reasonable like that. Name-changing is just a way to make the general public lose the thread. It makes insiders feel smarter that they know the new improved name, but it makes everybody else get confused and lose interest.

The topic being discussed was the reclassification of Pluto. The venue was Kevin Drum’s blog. The commenter: Steve Sailer.

Why is this worthy of dredging up after it’s been decomposing in a badly designed blog for two months?

Steve Sailer, probably best known for his regular commentary on the racist xenophobic nutjob website vdare.com, is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute, and likely the most important proponent of “scientific” racism, which he supports by making arguments based on spurious genetic-sounding claims. For instance, take a look at his explanation for patterns seen in interracial marriages in the US:

On average, black men tend to appear slightly more and Asian men slightly less masculine than white men, while Asian women are typically seen as slightly more and black women as slightly less feminine than white women.

Obviously, these are gross generalizations about the races. Nobody believes Michael Jackson could beat up kung-fu star Jackie Chan or that comedienne Margaret Cho is lovelier than Sports Illustrated swimsuit covergirl Tyra Banks. But life is a game of probabilities, not of abstract Platonic essences.

In case you think Sailer is merely describing stereotypes in a dispassionate if homophobic fashion, read further: he attempts to prove that those stereotypes have a basis in genetics. For instance, this is his explanation of just why it is that Angela Bassett and Beyoncé and Li’l Kim aren’t very feminine:

Since women do not go bald and can generally grow longer hair than men, most cultures associate longer hair with femininity. Although blacks’ hair doesn’t grow as long as whites’ or Asians’ hair, that’s not a problem for black women in all-black societies. After integration, though, hair often becomes an intense concern for black women competing with longer-haired women of other races. While intellectuals in black-studies departments’ ebony towers denounce “Eurocentric standards of beauty,” most black women respond more pragmatically. They one-up white women by buying straight from the source of the longest hair: the Wall Street Journal recently reported on the booming business in furnishing African-American women with “weaves” and “extensions” harvested from the follicularly gifted women of China.

One could go on and on. For instance, there’s Sailer’s remark after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans:

What you won’t hear, except from me, is that ‘Let the good times roll’ is an especially risky message for African-Americans. The plain fact is that they tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society.

Or there’s the statistics he fabricated to “show” that Bush carried states with higher white birth rates. People have been cataloguing Sailer’s lies, misrepresentations, and hateful rhetoric for some time, and a Google search will bring up a lot of examples.

So what do sauropods have to do with all this unpleasant racist crap? Simply this: Sailer’s only claim to legitimacy is basing his ridiculous, racist hogwash in authoritative-sounding biological writing. And yet, in the comment on Kevin Drum’s blog, he shows himself to be ignorant of one of the most basic underlying frameworks in the biological sciences, one which a typical undergraduate biology major has down pat by the end of freshman year.

I’m talking about the taxonomical Principle of Priority.

Biologists have international agreements that regulate, by a process of representative democracy, the formal names by which organisms are referred to in scientific and other literature. There are a few different bodies that oversee taxonomy in different branches of the biological sciences. The naming of animals is the turf of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, whose canon of formal naming rules is the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. Other branches have their own commissions and codes. This complex oversight is a necessary condition for efficient sharing of information on a global scale. If scientists were to use different names for the same species, doing a literature search would become next to impossible. The ICZN is merely an attempt to maintain a common filing system.

There are two aspects of that filing system that a sophomore Bio major — or a Serbian fourth-grader — will know by heart.

One is that each organism is referred to by a binomial consisting of genus and species, and that genus and species are lower levels in a hierarchy of taxa running up through Families and Phyla to Kingdoms and Domains.

The other is that if two scientists apply different names to the same organism, living, dead, or fossil, the rules of nomenclature demand that the earlier name be adopted as the correct name, unless the ICZN decides otherwise for some reason.

In the case of Brontosaurus, we don’t even have two competing scientists vying for posterity. Othniel Charles Marsh proposed both Brontosaurus and the earlier name to which it gave way, Apatosaurus. in 1877, Marsh published a description of an incomplete skeleton and assigned it the name Apatosaurus ajax. In 1879, he described another incomplete fossil skeleton and named it Brontosaurus excelsus.

Marsh published both papers in a hurry, without the supporting evidence and study that most paleontologists would prefer. In the 1870s, Marsh was engaged in the notorious “Bone Wars,” a feud with rival paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope over who could pull the most and scariest extinct animals out of the badlands of Western North America. Many of Marsh’s names are still in use today, but in 1903, Elmer Riggs from Chicago’s Field Museum determined that the fossil named Brontosaurus excelsus was not different enough from Apatosaurus ajax to justify distinct genera for the two. Apatosaurus was the prior name, so the Bronto became Apatosaurus excelsus.

No one contested this change for 80 years. The controversy to which Sailer vaguely refers didn’t hit until the late 1980s. Some museum curators, unaware of Riggs’ work, persisted in labeling their Apatosaurus models as “Brontosaurus.” Others labeled their models correctly, in accordance with Riggs’ work. In 1974, the paleontological community reaffirmed Riggs’ determination and formally repudiated the name “Brontosaurus.” When the US Postal Service issued dinosaur stamps featuring one of the four labeled “Brontosaurus,” taxonomical fundamentalists raised a fuss. That fuss got blown out of proportion in the press, and confused wth an entirely separate issue: Marsh had, a century before, incorrectly surmised that the fossil head of the related Camarasaurus actually belonged atop the neck of his Bronto.

People still talk about Brontosaurus having had its name changed in 1989, but the fact is that in 1989 that news was 86 years old. The name change was done in accordance with the rules of nomenclature, and corrected a bit of sloppy work done by a nonetheless revered bone collector. Let’s look at Sailer’s comment again:

Changing the name of the brontosaurus had to be one of the stupidest things scientists have done. It’s not like the Jesse Jackson of dinosaurs held a press conference and demanded the name be changed or anything semi-reasonable like that. Name-changing is just a way to make the general public lose the thread. It makes insiders feel smarter that they know the new improved name, but it makes everybody else get confused and lose interest.

Sailer mixes one marginally good point in with his ignorance of a basic underlying agreement of the science he claims to champion. Name changes do confuse the public, and it serves no one’s interest if an established taxon based on good research is changed because someone digs up an obscure and sloppy paper published in the Northeast Nevada Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology and Animal Husbandry whose author actually named the animal under discussion “Pronghornia billbobtuckeri” back in Eighteen Ought Five. The ICZN thus allows names that have gained widespread use to remain correct even if a prior name is discovered, subject to a vote by the members of the ICZN.

No one cared enough about Brontosaurus to propose the name be preserved, though paleontologist Bob Bakker has complained about the loss and has in fact proposed splitting out a new genus, Eobrontosaurus, which contains one species formerly known as Apatosaurus yahnahpin. But there is an example of a very similar situation that came out the other way, with the prior name being retired as a nomen oblitum precisely because the later name was widely known in both the scientific community and the public at large. It involves one of the other postage stamp dinos, which until the release of Jurassic Park and the consequent popularity of the previously unknown Velociraptors was pretty much the only other dinosaur people as biologically illiterate as Steve Sailer could name.

I’m talking, of course, about the fearsome Manospondylus gigas.

Terror of the Cretaceous, its seven-inch dagger-sharp teeth merely the most formidable weaponry to be found on this forty-foot-long, twenty-foot-high carnivore, M. gigas has populated the fantasies and nightmares of small children for a century. Of course, they haven’t called it Manospondylas gigas. They’ve called it Tyrannosaurus rex. That’s what Henry Fairfield Osborn named it when he described it in 1905, not knowing that Cope had described two partial T. rex vertebrae as M. gigas thirteen years before. The redundancy wasn’t noted until 2000, when paleontologists found more bones in Cope’s Manospondylus quarry and realized the two species were identical.

If Sailer’s calumny against actual scientists were accurate, the paleontologists would have rubbed their hands together in elitist glee. “And they thought Brontosaurus was a bitter pill? Now we can try to make them all forget T. rex! Why, the need to revise 1970s pop music album covers alone will cost them millions!”

But instead, cognizant of the confusion the change would sow in the dinosaur-literate public, the ICZN decided to invoke that section of the Code that allows a later name to be kept if, in the opinion of the Commission, going with the prior name would hinder the progress of knowledge. Sailer’s attack on — and I’ll repeat my insinuation here for good measure — real scientists is ignorant as well as nasty.

But this part of Sailer’s comment:

Changing the name of the brontosaurus had to be one of the stupidest things scientists have done. It’s not like the Jesse Jackson of dinosaurs held a press conference and demanded the name be changed or anything semi-reasonable like that.

...that’s just abysmally stupid. Sailer styles himself a student of biodiversity. You can’t describe biodiversity other than through taxonomy, and you can’t have taxonomy without agreement on naming procedures, and the Principle of Priority is that agreement in all but a handful of the tens of thousands of species names.

Sailer’s ignorance of the Principle of Priority shows him for what he is: a pseudointellectual charlatan whose interest in science is limited to that he can use to prop up his odious ideas for a racist audience that would buy it if he said Africans’ blood was made of phlogiston.

And that’s why I’m mentioning this two months late.