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Since the mid-1700s, researchers have classified life on Earth with scientific names, a two-word moniker like Homo sapiens. But some of these names are weighed down by problematic histories and troubling connotations. The botanical community has now taken steps to start changing them. Science reporter Ari Daniel has more.
ARI DANIEL, BYLINE: A couple years ago, Nokwanda Makunga traveled to Eastern South Africa up the coast from where she was raised. The large African coral trees were abloom.
NOKWANDA MAKUNGA: Just got these beautiful coral-colored flowers - it's like a peachy orange. So they're quite majestic in their appearance.
DANIEL: But there's a problem, the trees' scientific name.
MAKUNGA: Erythrina caffra.
DANIEL: It's that second word, which likely originally described where the tree was found. It's from the Arabic word for infidel, but it came to be used as a racial slur against Black people in South Africa and elsewhere.
MAKUNGA: That word carries a very violent, brutal history. And so when I see it, I get a bit of a sinking feeling in my body.
DANIEL: Makunga is a plant molecular biologist at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. She's given presentations that reference the coral tree, and she's had to write out or even say its derogatory name.
MAKUNGA: It is difficult to be pronouncing that as a Black person.
DANIEL: There are more than 200 plants whose scientific names have some variation of that word. Some go back to the late 1700s. Then last week, ahead of the International Botanical Congress, more than a hundred scientists gathered in Madrid. This group meets once every six years to discuss altering the code that's used to name every plant, fungus and algae species on the planet.
SANDY KNAPP: That's when the kind of rubber hits the road.
DANIEL: Sandy Knapp is a botanist at the Natural History Museum in London and chaired the group, which considered several hundred proposals to change the code in various ways, including one that confronted the derogatory word head-on with a simple solution.
KNAPP: Of our South African delegates - she said, what we could do is we could delete that C or delete that K, and then we could be proud to be Africans because all of these things would be named affrum or affrorum.
DANIEL: Some spoke against the proposal, others for it. At last, the question of whether the names of these plants should be changed came to a vote. Sixty-three percent were in favor, just clearing the 60% threshold required.
KNAPP: We would have been stupid not to do it. My community has taken a step. It's a baby step towards thinking about how names affect people, but it's an important first step.
DANIEL: Still, there are those who agree with this change but worry it could lead to a flurry of requests to alter the names of untold numbers of other species.
ALINA FREIRE-FIERRO: The names that were in the past - they should remain the way they are.
DANIEL: Alina Freire-Fierro is a botanist at the Technical University of Cotopaxi in Ecuador. She wasn't in Madrid last week.
FREIRE-FIERRO: You don't want to seem, like, bigoted or something like that, but at the same time, naming has to be a stable process. It could cause a lot of chaos.
DANIEL: Chaos because these names are shared across science, medicine and industry worldwide - last week, the group that voted to approve the renaming also established a special committee to discuss the ethics of naming species going forward. And starting in 2026, any new species names that are considered derogatory can be proposed for rejection. Adeyemi Aremu applauds these developments. He's the president of the South African Association of Botanists.
ADEYEMI AREMU: Are we going to be rigid and be insensitive, or be sensitive and go with the change because we do know that change is actually part of life?
DANIEL: Aremu was surprised the changes were approved, but he says they're critical for attracting diverse scientists to the field of botany and retaining them.
For NPR News, I'm Ari Daniel.
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