South Park nailed it. Once you open this door all is an endless road of somebody, somewhere, feeling outraged by something, and demanding to be changed.
In the end the goal seems to destroy one of the few things that we still agreed to do collectively as human species. Using an universal way to name the creatures that live in the planet.
The same species will have different Scientific names for suiting the preferences of Chinese, USA, Brazilians or Russians. After all, it isn't "racist" not being able to use the Chinese alphabet on scientific names?
Scientists will be automatically tagged as belonging to ideology or political party by the names that they will choose to enforce.
Countries with republics will try to wipe names honoring the kings of monarchies that patronage the scientific expeditions.
They don't even understand, or even worse don't care, about the precedent that they are setting.
> The same species will have different Scientific names for suiting the preferences of Chinese, USA, Brazilians or Russians
Generally the sensitivities of Americans take precedence. I can think of many examples in many fields (e.g. the word "master" because of its strongest association in the US is with slavery, which is not true everywhere).
I don’t disagree, but a counter point is that no one has ever agreed on everything - and colloquial names for species already exist — and that language drifts to and fro like a fog. Statis in connotation or denotation sounds somehow totalitarian to me. Even outside of colloquial speech and in the world of science, everything should be in flux, shouldn’t it?
The idea that the whole world would use the same language sounds much worse than the opposite: that different people would act differently.
Every biologist since 1700 agreed to use the Taxonomic rules (or tried, and failed, to improve the system). This collective project is one of our main success as species. Or maybe we should say "it was", that building has eroded a lot in the last 100 years.
That congress is basically the mess what happens where all scientists had been replaced by politicians.
Languages force us to be aware of certain concepts. English forces us to always be aware of tense (past, present, future) and the gender of people. Some languages require you to be aware of the gender of inanimate objects. A language actually could evolve to force people to be aware of political affiliation, and it wouldn't even be that weird, although it would be divisive.
Scientific language is not like Portuguese or English. Is a language in the same way as math or music are languages. Is a method universal to name things unequivocally with a fixed set of rules --and-- to honor the people that sweated blood and tears to discover this organisms for everyone of us to enjoy them.
Introducing politics in scientific language, is as obnoxious as claiming that is unacceptable that a score contains more white notes than black notes.
Do you realize this isn't a precedent being set now though? Species names change all the time, for a variety of reasons only some of them strictly scientific or out of actual taxonomic necessity. The hypotheticals you're alarmed at have already happened, in some cases over a century ago.
Species names change all the time for --Scientific-- reasons. That reflects that our knowledge about the species has improved. This move is totally unrelated with science, is bipartisan (not all scientists agree that the local toponym caffra is a racist word) and just adds a lot of confusion without improving our knowledge about the species.
In the end the goal seems to destroy one of the few things that we still agreed to do collectively as human species. Using an universal way to name the creatures that live in the planet.
The same species will have different Scientific names for suiting the preferences of Chinese, USA, Brazilians or Russians. After all, it isn't "racist" not being able to use the Chinese alphabet on scientific names?
Scientists will be automatically tagged as belonging to ideology or political party by the names that they will choose to enforce.
Countries with republics will try to wipe names honoring the kings of monarchies that patronage the scientific expeditions.
They don't even understand, or even worse don't care, about the precedent that they are setting.