alt Hacker NewsTo me, the choices of names for clades seem like madness:
All apes (superfamily): Hominoidea; great apes (family): Hominidae; African great apes (subfamily): Homininae; Pan‐Homo clade (tribe): Hominini; human clade (subtribe): Hominina. [0]
The potential for error seems enormous, and also imagine speaking those words without creating confusion, or try forming singulars and possessives that, in text and speech, unambiguously identify the clade.
Can anyone on the inside shed insight on why they do this to themselves, and to everyone else who has even less understanding? Is it self-hate? Imagine a large codebase that named variables like that - there would be a lynching late one night when the bug was found to be confusion.
Despite my reaction, I guess there is some good reason that all these smart, experienced people make this choice.
[0] From the paper the OP describes: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13485234/
Replies
I agree, but it is clear they got used to it. I suppose once you learn the endings, you can generate the higher genera from the name of a bottom level species familar to us like human-cat-dog / homo-felis-canis
Superfamily -oidea
Hominoidea | Feloidea | Canoidea |
Hominidae | Felidae | Canidae |
Homininae | Felinae (Small cats) | Caninae |
Hominini | Felini | Canini |
Hominina | Felina | Canina |Homie, no idea.
[Sorry I never joke but surely the biologists were joking when they came up with that so it should be fair game]
That's just the established naming convention. For brown bears, you have parvorder Ursida, superfamily Ursoidea, family Ursidae, subfamily Ursinae, tribe Ursini, genus Ursus, and finally species Ursus arctos. When there are millions of taxonomic names, you want to establish some kind of regular structure, because you are going to run out of useful distinctive names.