The debate arising from the announcement of Homo naledi, on what actually constitutes science is disturbing. It raises the question of science versus religion that is a horse flogged to death with no outcome but the death of the human soul. The argument should be scientism versus religion. Why?

Because there are two quite different ways of using the word “science”. Almost universally science is taken to be a function based solely on physical mensuration and on experiment and result gained from some sort of external physical observation i.e. scientism. This is a gross distortion because the word science is derived from the Latin word “scientea” that means “a KNOWING”. This knowing extends far beyond physical measurement and observation and is directly related to consciousness. Scientismists insist that consciousness is some sort of physical or chemical reaction that goes on in the nervous system. Absolute nonsense. Even the great palaeontologist gets it all wrong in his book “Rocks of ages” and his principle of non-overlapping magisteria.

Anyone can do true “science”. This is observation with sincerity of purpose, objectivity and a desire to know. Time I think will tell that the scientismic approach has been a deliberate distortion in which pursuit of knowledge has been directed away from the spiritual to the material. This is why the Dalai Lama and perhaps a few others have described the scientismic view of science as just another religion. The word science cannot be reduced to simple materialism as has been done. This is a distortion that has reduced man to the status of any other animal or plant.

So what about plant names?  In a way we have the same problem here. The sense and purpose of plant classification is to arrange plants in a hierarchy that reflects the orderly evolution from chaotic DNA and an original single life form, to that of more and more complex life forms with the human form as the pinnacle. It all started with study of physical characters and their imagined or studied development from one condition to another. The recently agreed truth, just like the belated acknowledgement of tectonic plate movement as the driver of continental drift, is that this dependence on simple physical characters is not satisfactory. The insights to DNA and the sequence analysis of the binding amino acids of the two strands of the nuclear protein structures have opened the window to a wholly different view of species and their relationships. 

But it should be noted that the argument is profound and the result actually not complete or perfect. The DNA sequencing is from limited access to many more millions of amino acid pairings each regarded now as a “character”. The statistical interpretation of the pairings and that presentation in a two-dimensional diagram is in my opinion a serious distortion.

Surprise after surprise is that the definition of what a species is, evades definition. Largely it is the zoological concept of non-interbreeding sets of life forms that constitute species that is followed in botany. But this is flawed. It is well known, especially in birds, that what may be seen to be two species in one place may not be true in another.  In plants that are position bound in respect of parentage and with less complex behavioural relationships, the position is considerably more confused. Because there is no true and secure definition and circumscription of what a species is, names have proliferated and abound where maybe there should be a lot less. Very few plant species have actually been grown for a study of their breeding relationships while conversely a great deal has been made of the variation within species, as well as of hybridization, for their use and benefit to man.

Estimates of the numbers of species of life vary.  These estimates are hardly useful without a real understanding of what a species is. Here in South Africa there are considered to be 24 000 to 25 000 species. Leaving this aside now, one has to look at the classification process and how plants are studied and organised. This is done in herbaria where dried specimens are assembled, mounted on sheets of cardboard and stored in herbaria. A name all begins in such a single (desirably more than one) specimen to which the name is attached. This is termed the “type specimen”. Theoretically all subsequent identifications should be confirmed by comparison with that single type. The system has worked incredibly well except for the problem of deviations that can be very misleading. Hence there is a constant revision as more and more specimens accumulate and things thought to be different are seen to be one and vice versa.

The next problem is that of personae. Not all individuals have equal skills or aptitudes and neither can any single person hope to acquire good enough knowledge of enough species and specimens to ensure any kind of consistency across the board. Unless species are actually cultivated from seed and the conditions of cultivation known to be non problematic, not enough is learned about variation to be really sure that something, say, with clubbed hairs on the leaves in one area, is not the same as something from another area that has simple hairs instead. Something as simple as this can lead to great argumentation about names. To top it all there is a huge element of personal achievement associated with the application of Latin names as well as an incentive to explorers to find and be associated with something new and different.

Still further confounding matters is that the type specimen may not be easily available to all and sundry and may not even be adequate for purposes of a good identification. This is because it is dried and pressed are sometimes out of recognition from the live state. Description is no easy matter and the original description may not even be accurate. The outcome is that herbaria acquire identifications of specimens based on those in other herbaria and these new identifications become the reference points for names.  They may be wrong. But the point is that a local use of a name becomes established and this may not be the same as that derived from the identification of another herbarium and its staff.

Public interest leads to the production of literature and things such as field guides and other reference works. A problem is that illustrating a single species and all its variants is just not physically possible. Firstly there is a problem that an author, however competent and skilled, may not even be familiar with all the variants even in his/her own special field of study. It is worth noting that in a genus such as Asparagus with only about 70 species in South Africa, there is simply not enough herbarium storage space to assemble just single specimens from across the distribution range. There is hardly one of these species for which a herbarium sheet is adequate to record a root system. How does one acquire and store all the information to report on the diversity and distribution of the respective group members?

Identifying from a field guide is thus problematic because there are things that look very similar and differences may either not be obvious to the inquirer but also species may be mentioned in discussion and not illustrated at all. For the average mind it is the picture that tells the story.

This primarily the reason for this site – to try and establish a local reference point so that an interest and awareness of a very special local creation becomes attainable.