Posted By crates on March 17, 2009

I’ve spent a great deal of time categorizing things.  We all do this from birth, some more than others I think.  As we grow up from early childhood, we are always learning new things, and trying to place everything in the proper perspective.  We learn to name things.

As a child I learned the names of all the common trees and birds.  I learned most of the flowers in my mother’s garden, and then later after becoming interested in snakes and other reptiles, I learned  the names of most of the ones in that part of Texas where I grew up.  I memorized the scientific names of all of them and proceeded to learn the scientific names of amphibians, birds, flowers, insects, plants and so on.  I still have an intense interest in learning the names of everything.  On a recent trip to Panama I was extremely frustrated because I didn’t know the names of anything!

I think that learning to differentiate between things is a good thing in many respects.  I can tell a black oak from a red oak,  and Bufo woodhousei from B. valliceps for example.  Learning to differentiate between all the various living things that have interested me has given me an intense appreciation of just how varied and diverse life is on earth.  It has also organized my mind and the way that I think about things.  We need labels, tags, names to get a mental grasp of the universe in order to make some sort of coherent sense of it.

However, I have noticed something about this naming process.  After I had learned all the various minutiae concerning the genera and species of a wide spectrum of creatures, I was immensely perturbed when somebody changed the name of a beloved and well known species.

Due to the  esoteric regulations governing the taxonomy of flora and fauna, it sometimes happens that a diligent taxonomist finds a problem and feels it is necessary to rename an organism.  This has become especially common as DNA analysis has revealed that a group that was believed to contain an assemblage of closely related organisms was found to be made up of widely different types of organism which didn’t not share a common ancestor.  In other words they were found to not be that closely related.   There were groups of birds, for example, that were found to be made up of individuals that weren’t that closely related (e.g. ratites).  This invariably results in a renaming of the organisms.

I have become highly incensed when this has happened, and I know that other people react the same way.  However, I got to thinking about this, and realized that changing the name of an organism did not change the creature in any way!  The organism remained the same, the bird was the same bird, the snake the same snake (re: the genera Haldea and Virginia!).   I still have to stop sometimes and remind my self that the pointer is not the object! To name something is not to possess it or to change it in any way (despite stories about how knowing the true name of something gives one power over it); the essence of the object remains the same.  And this essence is unknowable in an ultimate sense.  We can intimate the essence, but it remains forever outside of our grasp.

Categories: nature
Tags: nature, perception, ratite, reality, Taoism, taxonomy, ZEN