14 DAY TRIAL // Given our general behavior, our species should no longer be called Homo sapiens, which is Latin for Wise Man. That is no longer the case, a number of experts add, given our short-sightedness, our bickering, and our general predisposition towards selfishness.
None of these attributes belongs to a wise man. Even our society is put together with an emphasis on competition, violence towards others, and a culture of achieving personal objectives with utter disregard towards others, the environment, other species and so on.
All these aspects indicate that we are not wise. We may be more technologically advanced than ever before, but even the scientific community is ruled by the same principles as the rest of society.
In an article published in the August 18 issue of the top scientific journal Nature, Australian science writer and book author Julian Cribb proposes that our species be renamed, since we are not befitting of the name we set for ourselves.
The fact that we constantly put ourselves, our society and our environment in peril through our daily actions is a testimony to our lack of wisdom and long-term vision. Anthropologists have been aware of these limitations in our ability to think forward for centuries.
“Changing our species name might risk infringing some of the hallowed rules of nomenclature, but it would send an important signal about our present collective behavior,” Cribb writes in Nature.
In an e-mail response the expert wrote for LiveScience, he explains why he did not propose a new name for the species. “I want humanity at large to discuss this issue – not just scientists,” he explains.
Though many other experts do not agree with Cribb's proposal, they do acknowledge the fact that our species must not cross the planetary boundaries science identified. These are thresholds beyond which our very existence on this planet may be jeopardized.
The most obvious boundaries that are about to be cross include climate change, chemical pollution, and biodiversity loss. All of them are extremely well-documents, in spite of what naysayers, oil corporation and conservative politicians would have you believe.
“It's not a matter of changing names, it is a matter of changing actions,” Carnegie Institution of Washington climate expert Ken Caldeira says of the new proposal.
“My feeling is that we have much more serious issues to deal with than to start worrying about things like this. We have a huge task ahead, and so let's focus on the future rather than start dealing with these kinds of issues of the past,” Sander van der Leeuw says.
The expert is a professor of anthropology and sustainability at Arizona State University. He believes that Cribb's proposal is unproductive. Our species was named Homo sapiens by the father of the modern system for classifying organisms, Carl Linnaeus, back in 1758.