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For the first time, the scientific name of more than 200 plant species has been changed because it refers to a racist term. According to the researchers, this is also the first time that a plant’s name has been changed for political and social reasons, rather than scientific ones.
The scientific names of plants are used to identify them, and in general they do not change, preserving the history of the species that was named so hundreds of years ago.
But this time, botanists, at an international botanical conference held in Madrid, decided to change the word “Kafra” that accompanied the name of plants coming from Africa, to “Afra”. According to the researchers, the change was due to a “spelling error”, but that is not the case.
- In Arabic, the word means “infidel”, and was used to refer to non-Muslims, until it was reused to refer to black African slaves.
- In South Africa, the word is considered a highly offensive racial slur, including under penalty of imprisonment.
Now, with the change, from 2026 onwards, a coral tree found on the coast, for example, will no longer be called Erythrina caffra and will instead be called Erythrina affra. The vote was proposed by Gideon Smith and Estrella Figueiredo, plant taxonomists at Nelson Mandela University (NMU) in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, and the measure was accepted by a vote of 351 to 205.
“We had confidence in the whole process, and we had overwhelming global support from our colleagues, even though the vote was close,” Gideon Smith told the magazine. nature.
Change divides opinions
In general, names are only changed if a discrepancy is discovered in the research determining the origin of the plant, indicating that it came from somewhere else and would therefore need another name.
This is the first time that botanists have decided to change the name not for scientific reasons, but for social ones. The decision has its complications: Although the removal of the racist term was generally considered a good thing, botanist Aline Freire Fierro, of the Technical University of Cotopaxi in Ecuador, fears that the decision could open the door to other similar changes. “This could cause a lot of confusion and problems for professionals in many fields other than botany.”
The species called “Kafari” is not the only one with a controversial name when analyzed in the current social context. Discussions about names are becoming increasingly frequent in science.
With this issue in mind, scientists from the Nomenclature Section of the Botanical Congress have set up an ethics committee for the names of newly discovered plants, fungi and algae. The species name is generally determined by the researcher who discovered and described it in the scientific literature, but it can now be rejected by the committee if it is deemed offensive to a group of people. The rule will apply to species described for the first time from 2026.
See other changes in plant and animal names:
- Scientists who study insects have abandoned common names. “Gypsy Butterflies” and “Gypsy Ants”Because it demeans the Roma people, for example.
- In the animal kingdom, there are still species that honor people like themselves. Adolf Hitler (Rotschlingia Hitlerii) and Benito Mussolini (Hypopta mussolinii, moth)However, none of these names have been changed.
- In the case of plants, critics point out that the decision is complex, because it does not affect just one species, but hundreds. In other words, it will be necessary to change the name of hundreds of plants that already have a history.
Fred Barry, a botanist at the Field Museum in Chicago and a member of the editorial board of the International Code of Nomenclature for Algae, Fungi and Plants, told The New York Times that stability is important in plant nomenclature, and he warns that changing thousands of species names would become an “impractical nightmare.”
There are thousands of plant species names that contain words that are or could be considered offensive to some groups of people, Sergei Mosyakin, head of the Ukrainian Botanical Society, told The Times, warning that the discussion could be just the beginning.
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