In 1758, Carl Linnaeus published the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae, a book that would anchor the modern system of binomial nomenclature—the two-part Latin names we still use for every known organism. Linnaeus did not invent naming, of course. He standardized it, and in doing so, he made a series of decisions that still ripple through every herbarium cabinet, every taxonomic database, every field guide. The beetle Scarabaeus sacer got its name not because of some intrinsic property of the beetle, but because Linnaeus decided that the sacred scarab of Egyptian iconography deserved a Latin binomial that echoed its cultural weight. The name was a record of a decision, and that decision had a context: Linnaeus’s own reading of classical texts, his correspondence with collectors in the Levant, his ambition to create a universal language for natural history. Every name since has followed the same pattern, though the contexts have shifted—from colonial expeditions to molecular phylogenetics labs, from handwritten ledgers to digital identifiers.
We tend to treat scientific names as neutral labels, as if Homo sapiens simply means what it means, transparently and forever. But a name is never just a label. It is an artifact of a specific historical moment, a funding priority, a cultural bias, a power struggle. The quiet politics of scientific nomenclature—who gets to name, what rules govern the naming, whose names get erased—reveals as much about institutional power as it does about the natural world. And in an era when trust in authoritative knowledge systems is fraying, understanding those politics becomes urgent. When we see that the names we take for granted are not inevitable but were made by people with interests, we can begin to ask better questions about what else in our knowledge infrastructure was made the same way.
The Rules of the Game: Codes, Committees, and the Bureaucracy of Naming
Scientific naming is not a free-for-all. It is governed by elaborate, internationally agreed-upon codes: the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) for animals, the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants (ICN), and separate codes for bacteria and viruses. These codes are maintained by committees—the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, the Nomenclature Section of the International Botanical Congress—whose members debate arcane points of Latin grammar, priority of publication, and the validity of names published in obscure journals. The rules are bureaucratic, often arbitrary, and fiercely defended. A name published in a valid journal before a certain date has priority over all later names, even if the later name is more descriptive, more accurate, or more widely used. The principle of priority was meant to stabilize nomenclature, but it has also locked in names that reflect the biases and blind spots of earlier eras.
Consider the case of Anophthalmus hitleri, a blind cave beetle named in 1937 by an Austrian entomologist who admired Adolf Hitler. The name is valid under the ICZN code because it was properly published. Efforts to suppress it have failed, because the code prioritizes stability over ethical revision. The beetle’s name persists, a small, dark monument to the fact that nomenclature is not a neutral system but a historical record of who had the power to name and what they valued. The committees that govern naming are aware of these problems, but they move slowly, constrained by their own rules and by the fear that opening the door to ethical revision would unleash chaos. Every proposed change—allowing the replacement of offensive names, for instance—triggers debates about precedent, stability, and the purpose of a name. Is a name a description, a historical document, or a tool for communication? The answer depends on who you ask, and the committees are made up of people with different answers.
Colonial Legacies in Latin Binomials
The Linnaean system spread across the globe on the decks of European ships. Naturalists on colonial expeditions collected specimens, described them, and named them, often after patrons, monarchs, or themselves. The names they chose embedded colonial power structures into the very language of science. Banksia, a genus of Australian shrubs, honors Joseph Banks, the botanist who sailed with Captain Cook and who helped shape British imperial botany. Victoria amazonica, the giant water lily, names both the British queen and the Amazon basin, collapsing a complex Indigenous world into a European taxonomic frame. These names are not merely commemorative; they are claims. To name a species after a person or a place was to assert a kind of ownership, to write European science onto landscapes that already had their own names, their own systems of classification, their own knowledge holders.
The problem is not just that colonial names are offensive, though many are. The problem is that the rules of nomenclature make it almost impossible to change them. The principle of priority means that the first validly published name sticks, even if it was published by a collector who never set foot in the region, who relied on Indigenous guides he did not credit, who named the species after a patron who funded the expedition with profits from the slave trade. The International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants recently debated a proposal to allow the rejection of names that are “culturally offensive or inappropriate,” but the proposal failed. The arguments against it were revealing: some taxonomists argued that cultural offensiveness is too subjective, that stability must come first, that changing names would create confusion. These are reasonable concerns, but they also reflect a particular set of priorities—the priorities of those who already have the power to name, who benefit from the stability of the existing system, who do not have to live with the daily reminder that a plant their ancestors used for medicine is named after a colonial administrator.
The Quiet Labor of Taxonomists and the Politics of Recognition
Behind every scientific name is a taxonomist who did the work of describing, comparing, and publishing. That work is often invisible, undervalued, and increasingly precarious. Taxonomy is not a glamorous field. It does not attract the same funding as genomics or drug discovery. Yet without taxonomists, we would not know what species exist, where they live, or how they are related. The labor of taxonomy is quiet, meticulous, and essential—and it is also political. Who gets to be a taxonomist, whose work gets cited, whose names get accepted, all depend on access to collections, to journals, to networks of patronage. Taxonomists in the Global South, where much of the world’s undescribed biodiversity resides, often lack the resources to publish in the journals that the international codes recognize as valid. Their names may never enter the official record, while a well-funded researcher from a Northern institution can describe dozens of species in a single monograph.
The politics of recognition extends to the names themselves. Eponymous names—species named after people—are disproportionately drawn from a narrow circle of European and North American scientists, patrons, and collectors. A 2020 study of eponymous bird names found that over 90% honored men, and most of those men were European or North American. The American Ornithological Society recently announced a plan to rename dozens of birds that carry eponyms linked to colonialism and slavery, a decision that sparked fierce debate within the ornithological community. The debate is not just about birds. It is about who gets to decide what counts as a legitimate name, what history we want to carry forward, and what it means to do science in a world where the legacies of empire are still written into the names we use every day.
From Ledgers to Databases: The Digital Transformation of Naming
The act of naming has always been tied to the technologies of record-keeping. Linnaeus used paper slips and index cards—a system he adapted from the accounting practices of his time. The index card, that humble rectangle of stiff paper, became the backbone of taxonomic work for two centuries, enabling taxonomists to sort, compare, and retrieve information about species in ways that bound volumes could not. The card catalog was a significant information technology, and it shaped the way taxonomists thought about the natural world: as a set of discrete, sortable units, each with its own card, its own name, its own place in a hierarchical system. The index card did not just record knowledge; it structured it.
Today, taxonomic names live in databases: the Catalogue of Life, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, the World Register of Marine Species. These databases are powerful tools, but they are not neutral. Every database has a schema, and every schema encodes decisions about what counts as a valid name, what counts as a synonym, what counts as a species. The shift from paper to digital has not eliminated the politics of naming; it has embedded those politics in algorithms and data structures. A database that automatically prioritizes the oldest available name, for instance, is enforcing the principle of priority without any human judgment about whether that name is appropriate or accurate. The database becomes a kind of bureaucratic actor, making decisions that shape what we can know and how we can know it.
This digital transformation also creates new kinds of names. Specimens in natural history collections are increasingly assigned digital identifiers—barcodes, QR codes, UUIDs—that link the physical object to a database record. These identifiers are not names in the traditional sense, but they function as names: they are unique, persistent, and referential. They are also products of specific institutional decisions. A barcode standard like the one used by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility encodes assumptions about what counts as a specimen, what metadata matters, and how collections should be organized. The barcode is a name, and like all names, it has a politics. It was designed by particular people, at particular institutions, with particular funding streams, and it reflects their priorities. When we scan a barcode on a beetle specimen, we are not just accessing data; we are participating in a system of naming that was built by someone, for someone, with someone’s interests in mind.
In a world where the sheer volume of information can feel overwhelming, the impulse to generate order through naming systems is powerful. Even outside of science, we see this in the popularity of tools like a fantasy name generator that helps writers build consistent fictional worlds. The same logic applies: a name is never just a label; it carries connotations, histories, and structural relationships. In fiction, as in taxonomy, the act of naming is an act of world-building, and the systems we use to generate names shape the worlds we can imagine.
The Crisis of Trust and the Need for Context
We live in a moment of profound distrust in authoritative knowledge systems. Public opinion data from the Pew Research Center consistently shows declining trust in institutions, including scientific institutions, across many countries. This distrust has many sources, but one of them is the sense that the systems that produce knowledge are opaque, unaccountable, and shaped by interests that are not our own. Scientific nomenclature is a case in point. When we learn that a beetle is named after a Nazi, that a plant is named after a slave trader, that a bird is named after a colonial governor, we are not just learning a fact about the past. We are learning that the names we take for granted were made by people with power, and that those people often used that power in ways we now find abhorrent. The names become evidence of a system that has not been honest about its own history.
Rebuilding trust requires more than just changing names, though that is part of it. It requires making the politics of naming visible, legible, and open to democratic deliberation. It requires acknowledging that every name is a record of a decision, and that every decision has a context. It requires institutions—museums, herbaria, databases—to document not just the names but the decisions behind the names: who made them, when, under what circumstances, with what funding, for what purpose. This is the kind of work that the Brookings Institution and other policy research organizations have long argued is essential for rebuilding institutional legitimacy: transparency about process, accountability for past decisions, and a willingness to revise systems that no longer serve the public good.
The quiet politics of scientific nomenclature is not a niche concern for taxonomists. It is a window into how knowledge is made, maintained, and contested. Every name we use—for a beetle, a plant, a virus, a star—is a small piece of institutional memory, a trace of the power struggles that shaped our understanding of the world. To read those names critically is to see the catalog behind the catalog, the ideology behind the index card, the human decisions behind the database. And to change those names, when necessary, is to take responsibility for the knowledge we inherit and the knowledge we pass on.