This spider's named Neil, not Boris

Myrmekiaphila NeilYoungi. Photo by East Carolina News Services

Musician Neil Young gets a species of trapdoor spider named after him
by Eric Jackson, from other media

The march of science is relentless, with new discoveries upsetting old beliefs on a regular basis.

Are you one of those folks who knew that all spiders are named Boris? Think again. Scientific knowledge has advanced, and for that matter, so has rock and roll.

East Carolina University biology professor Jason Bond, who's a taxonomist (one who classifies species) and a systematist (one who studies the methodology of classifying species) who studies spiders, ran across this species of trapdoor spider that had not previously been described in scientific literature. The arachnid --- like insects, spiders are arthopods, but they're not insects because they have eight legs instead of six and they have lungs of a sort that insects don't among other things --- was encountered last year in Jefferson County, Alabama. Dr. Bond consulted with Norman I. Platnick, a curator with the American Museum of Natural History, and the two of them wrote a paper on the trapdoor spiders genus (Myrmekiaphiliae). By morphology, one tells the different spiders of this genus apart by their reproductive organs. These days, however, they are more definitively distinguished by DNA analysis.

Once it was determined that Bond had discovered a new species of spider, it was his prerogative, within the constricts of taxonomy's protocols, to name the thing.

Bond really likes Canadian rock musician Neil Young, both as a musician and as a peace and justice activist. So the guy who way back when observed "Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s" and with regard to the current US administration advocated "Let's impeach the president for lying [etc.]," got a spider named after him: Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi.

This, no doubt, will raise new scientific questions, about causality. Is George W. Bush so anti-science because biologists are the sorts of people who would do such a thing to him, or do biologists appreciate Bush's critics because he's so anti-science?

News \| Economy \| Culture \| Opinion \| Lifestyle \| Science \| Outdoors Noticias \| Opiniones \| Calendar \| Archive \| Unclassified Ads\| Home	Volume 14, Number 9 May 4 - 17, 2008

science, technology & health