The image above pictures Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman. He was a brilliant physicist whose work helps us understand how blue feathers get their color, among many other things. His name is attached to concepts such as Raman scattering and Raman spectroscopy.

We name things. The natural world overflows with an abundance of variety and if we are to study it, we must name all the parts.

The natural world isn’t just birds and trees, slime molds and foraminifera. It also consists of galaxies, asteroids, and exo-planets. Sediments and minerals and geological layers that we cannot see. Cycles, conservation laws, and symmetries. Rules that govern how currents flow past continents. It consists of processes, pathways and principles that exist independently of humans. We have to discover them, and that isn’t easy.

The natural world is chemistry, physics and mathematics. (Yes, mathematics is nature, nature at its most fundamental level. It certainly isn’t a human invention or “language.” Like physics, it discovers truths that exist “out there” and corresponds to a reality that is independent of us.)

When we name what we discover in nature, we sometimes, not always, give some credit to those that did the work. It is not a perfect process, and sometimes it has been unfair. But there are good reasons to recognize people and provide some additional incentive for contributing to our shared knowledge. In some fields, this is a common practice. In others, not so much. For example, the common English Bird Names that commemorate a person account for some 5% of the names used in North America.

Since I am a physicist, I will, off the top of my head, riff on some of the names we use to refer to other parts of the same natural world, parts that are no less real than a sparrow. In fact they are more fundamental than a sparrow, more universal. You may know some, not others:

Galilean invariance. Newton’s laws of motion. Bose-Einstein statistics. Fermion. Maxwell’s equations. The Stark effect. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Curie temperature. Planck’s constant. The Pauli exclusion principle. The Higgs boson. Fraunhofer lines. Helmholtz free energy. The Schrödinger equation. Minkowski space. Amperage. Voltage. Gaussian distribution. Lorentz transformation. The Laplacian. The Hamiltonian. Kepler’s laws. Noether’s theorem…

I hear you snoring… Apologies! I’m a nerd and was just getting started, but I’ll stop. You get the idea: we name a lot more than 5% of our “birds” in physics after people.

You may not know much about the people honored with these names. I imagine that if you did some digging, you’d eventually find something objectionable about most of them. (If you find nothing, well, then, that particular soul must have hid their skeletons pretty well.) I’ve never engaged in such an intellectually forlorn activity myself, but have at it, if you are so inclined. I do know that Johannes Stark was downright evil (he also won a Nobel Prize), and that even kindly old Albert Einstein, everyone’s favorite eccentric, genius uncle, expressed horribly racist ideas about Chinese people. Sorry to inform you of that, if that’s news to you. (Losing your innocence sucks. If we are going to enforce the rule that only morally perfect people can be celebrated… well, the party’s over, isn’t it? Because that applies to every one of your heroes, too.)

Do these names, and the thousands more like them (not to mention those in other fields) all need to be changed to make science more “welcoming”? Are these “verbal statues” that must come down?

Where does it stop?

As for bird names, if we could have rational actors representing the two sides of this drama, they’d meet in the middle. And if I were one of the parties, I would most respectfully say to the other side: I’m willing to listen. I pledge to learn about my own actions and what I can do to make a better world of birding for everyone. Give me concrete steps and I will take them. And yes, I’ll accept (against my own better judgment) that we take down some bird names that are representative of the worst examples you’ve cited. I understand the symbolic value of doing this. I’ll meet you halfway. But you cannot have them all. You cannot have Alexander Wilson and a number of others who, despite whatever flaws they might have had, were extraordinary, inspiring individuals. You are going to have to give some ground. The sweeping demands are simply unreasonable, and you know it. If you honor diversity, you’ll honor diversity of opinion as well. And then we’ll put this behind us and move on together, and we will all be better for it. Let it be birders that show the world that in this one little area, we can actually solve problems together. Pinewoods (nee Bachman’s) Sparrow and Wilson’s Warbler. Everyone wins. Everyone learns something about “the other side.” What do you say?

If my work here resonates with you, please share it.

I wish you all the birdiest of days.