Transgender trilobites: woke taxonomy at work
It emerged in late April that residents of Trump Plaza, a 40-storey skyscraper in the New York suburb of New Rochelle, had a real problem with their address: it was named after Donald Trump. As Trump is considered by all right-thinking American voters to be The Most Evil Man Who Has Ever Lived, some tower-dwellers think association with his name is pushing the potential value of their property down. They are organising a vote to see whether the building should be renamed after someone less controversial – Genghis Khan, Sauron, Darth Vader, Humbert Humbert or Heinrich Himmler, perhaps. For certain people in New Rochelle, simply having to walk past a building sharing the name of such a notorious racist as Mr Trump, described by one local as being “the Devil himself”, was an act of violence against their very being. Still, the process of renaming a building is a fairly simple legal procedure. How on earth would such easily offended, over-sensitive souls go about renaming an animal which had been named after The Donald? There is just such a creature, Neopalpa donaldtrumpi, an endangered species of Californian moth. It was named after Trump because of its unusual orange “hairstyle” (actually head-scales) and “unique genitalia”. The entomologist who named the moth in 2017 hoped it would encourage the then-new President to enact various national conservation measures. In fact his act was more likely to encourage Trump’s foes to head out into the Californian scrub in search of the poor creatures armed with insect-spray and rolled-up newspapers. A nomenclative reckoning may now be coming for all such carelessly christened creatures. In 2024 the American Ornithological Society, distressed by the fact that certain US birds are named after evil individuals from the nation’s dark past of slave-owning and Indian genocide, has begun comprehensively relabelling every native species named after human beings of any kind – because they were all white, and therefore morally irredeemable. Mother Nature itself now urgently has to be decolonised. Pressure is building for woke zoologists to begin renaming other animals likewise – so Neopalpa donaldtrumpi’s days may indeed be numbered after all, at least under its problematic name. Yet, when it comes to being named after controversial political figures, other species may be even worse off than the Donald Trump Moth … Volkswagen Beetle Did you know there is an obscure beetle named after Adolf Hitler? Well, there is. Anophthalmus hitleri (“Eyeless Hitler”), a pale-skinned Slovenian cave-beetle, was named after Adolf in 1933 by an Austrian admirer, perhaps on account of its uncontrollable habit of greedily swallowing up anything smaller and weaker nearby it could get its mandibles on, like the Südetenland or Poland. As Hitler apparently liked beetles, he sent the entomologist who christened the insect an official thank-you note. Anophthalmus hitleri has yet to be renamed, but there is a movement now to get the brownshirt beetle rechristened. Already, in 2018, when Greek bug-botherers discovered a closely-related cave beetle, they named it Duvalius owensi after Jesse Owens, the black US runner who won four golds at Hitler’s 1936 Summer Olympics, thus undermining his doctrine of Aryan racial supremacy, in order to demonstrate that the scientists in question were on the right side of history. It seems that bug-fanciers would like to justify their renaming of the Hitler Beetle on spurious environmental concerns, claiming that, due to the species’ new-found notoriety, neo-Nazi bug-hunters are descending upon Slovenian caves, collecting the poor coleopteroid to death in the name of fascism, and selling them on for up to £1,200 per specimen. Yet, as Dr Max Barclay, a curator at London’s Natural History Museum and co-author of Beetles of the World: A Natural History, told the New York Times in December 2023, if you were to draw a Venn diagram of entomologists, speleologists (cave-explorers), and neo-Nazis, “How many people are in the overlap of these three tiny circles?” None, it would appear. According to Dr Barclay: “I know all the good entomologists capable of finding and recognizing them [Hitler Beetles], and I am fairly sure none are Nazis and only two or three have ever been in a cave.” The entomologists in question want to rename the Hitler Beetle, because, like the people of New Rochelle with Donald Trump, they disapprove of Hitler’s politics. The environmental concerns are merely a convenient excuse. However, when he heard about the campaign, the President of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), Thomas Pape, was having none of it, declaring in 2022 that Anophthalmus hitleri “was not offensive when it was proposed, and it may not be offensive 100 years from now.” Well, I hope that Mr. Pape is incorrect in his apparent prediction that a Führer-rehabilitating Fourth Reich will arise at some point over the coming century, but I do agree that renaming the Hitler Beetle – or indeed The Donald Moth – is a pointless exercise. Or is it? To most ordinary people, I think it would be. But to those with the actual institutional power, it may serve a genuine useful function: namely, as an illustration of their current comprehensive powers to control and reshape every single aspect of the much hated (to them, at least) traditional society which surrounds them. Even down to the names of tiny, insignificant insects.