Thanks to everyone for your support. We have over 3,000 signatures. Every state in the U.S. is represented and people from over 48 countries have signed. Let's keep pressure on the AOS. Please share the petition and help to increase our signature base. Word of mouth is the only way to increase awareness about our goal to have the AOS reverse course.  

And finally from Kevin Zimmer: There have been some recent publications by authors from the “Global South” not only advocating for the retention of eponymous names (See Jost et al, Nature Ecology & Evolution 2023; Pethiyagoda 2023), but also demonstrating the real-life negative implications to ornithologists and other biologists in countries outside of the US if the elimination of eponyms and wholesale renaming of bird species were to take place.  Jost et al.2023 (a publication with more than 20 co-authors, almost all of them native-born Latin Americans), referring to the anti-eponym movement, state:  “They want to erase eponyms assigned to species in the past and want scientists to stop naming new species after people.  Both of these proposals would hurt science, and disproportionately hurt science in the Global South – the region that is supposed to be the primary beneficiary of their proposal.”  The authors go on to say – “Naming species after people has always been a powerful tool that biologists have used to thank their patrons, recognize their field assistants, and honor their colleagues or loved ones.  This is the highest honor that an individual biologist can bestow on a person….In recent years some biologists have also used the naming of species to raise funds for research and, especially, for conservation.  

Although it is true that most eponyms assigned have historically honored Europeans, the pace of species discovery in tropical countries is currently high, and in the past few decades local taxonomists (at least in Latin America) are overtaking European scientists in making these discoveries.  The power of bestowing eponyms has shifted to these local scientists in the tropical countries where most undiscovered species live.

Using eponyms, local scientists can now fund their work, honor local scientists, recognize Indigenous leaders and policy-makers, and help save their study organisms from extinction.  It is unfortunate and discriminatory that some members of the scientific community want to take away this tool, just at the moment that non-European biologists are becoming its main beneficiaries.  Rather than eliminating eponyms, causing chaos in the existing nomenclature and erasing the rich and convoluted personal history of biology, we should instead embrace them enthusiastically and use them to generate and record the next and more diverse chapters of that history.”