When true is false, and false is true

Abstract

It is surprising to see how many times the false potato beetle (Leptinotarsa juncta (Germar)) is incorrectly presented as Colorado potato beetle (the famous L. decemlineata (Say)) in widely-circulated entomological publications (e.g. Milne & Milne 1980), and in numerous websites. These, then, are truly “false” potato beetles! Beyond errors such as this, there is a philosophical question of whether any (good) species should be called “false.” Official ESA Common Names include nine unfortunate species in seven orders listed with official common names including the label “false” (including the above-mentioned false potato beetle). Try this search at http://www.entsoc.org/ Pubs/Common_Names/ entering *false* under common name. Of these nine, three are distinguished from their namesakes at the species level, three at the genus level, two at the family level, and one—the pine false webworm, a sawfly—is in a different order from the pine webworm, a pyralid moth. Of the roughly 880,000 species lists on the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) 2006 Annual Checklist, 853 are listed with “false” in the vernacular name, yet only 26 with “true”! “False” is a particularly common plant moniker, perhaps because the plant in question did not measure up in some way medicinally or culinarily, or perhaps it poisoned its collector, as would the false morel mushroom. The common names of plants offer many more “false” names than any other groups, probably an outgrowth of the Doctrine of Signatures (Lehane 1977), which focused on human use of plants, guided supposedly by the signs God had left for their use on Earth. So we have boneset and false boneset, the former one the true remedy as allegedly signified by its perfoliate (fused) leaves. The Merriam-Webster Unabr idged D i c t i o n a r y lists vernacular names for 84 organisms as false this or that, 71 of them h igher plants, four fungi, three mammals (including the false killer whale and the false vampire bat), one fish, one mollusk, two insects (false wireworm and false chinch bug), and two groups of other arthropods, false scorpions and false spider mites, not to mention three plant diseases including cranberry false blossom (vectored by a leafhopper), and three animal diseases including false gid (caused by the sheep botfly). Yet, as entomologists, we know that common names are rare and fickle, whereas scientific names are the basis for all taxonomic discourse! But here we have the even more rampant use of pseudo. Of the ITIS 880,000, over 20,000 species names and 13,000 species with genus names include the “false” root pseud-! Take for example the widely-used laboratory animal Drosophila pseudoobscura Dobzhansky (Diptera: Drosophilidae). The opposite moniker, vera, (or veris, or verum) is much less common, Dioctria vera Back (Diptera: Asilidae) being only When true is false, and false is true