Scientific Name
The species was first named (as Culex aegypti) in a 1757 publication by Fredric Hasselquist titled Iter Palaestinum ("A Journey to Palestine"). Hasselquist was provided with the names and descriptions by his mentor, Carl Linnaeus. Iter Palaestinum was later translated into German and published in 1762 as Reise nach Palästina. Since the latter is an uncritical reproduction of the former, they are both considered to pre-date the starting point for zoological nomenclature in 1758. Nonetheless, the name Aedes aegypti was frequently used, starting with H. G. Dyar in 1920.
In order to stabilise the nomenclature, a petition to the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature was made by P. F. Mattingly, Alan Stone and Kenneth L. Knight in 1962. It also transpired that, although the name Aedes aegypti was universally used for the yellow fever mosquito, Linnaeus had actually described a species now known as Aedes (Ochlerotatus) caspius. In 1964, the commission ruled in favour of the proposal, validating Linnaeus' name, and transferring it to the species for which it was in general use.
The yellow fever mosquito belongs to the tribe Aedini of the dipteran family Culicidae and to the genus Aedes and subgenus Stegomyia. According to one recent analysis, the subgenus Stegomyia of the genus Aedes should be raised to the level of genus. The proposed name change has been ignored by most scientists; at least one scientific journal, the Journal of Medical Entomology, has officially encouraged authors dealing with aedine mosquitoes to continue to use the traditional names, unless they have particular reasons for not doing so.
Read more about this topic: Aedes Aegypti
Famous quotes containing the word scientific:
“The teacher must derive not only the capacity, but the desire, to observe natural phenomena. In our system, she must become a passive, much more than an active, influence, and her passivity shall be composed of anxious scientific curiosity and of absolute respect for the phenomenon which she wishes to observe. The teacher must understand and feel her position of observer: the activity must lie in the phenomenon.”
—Maria Montessori (18701952)
“The conclusion suggested by these arguments might be called the paradox of theorizing. It asserts that if the terms and the general principles of a scientific theory serve their purpose, i. e., if they establish the definite connections among observable phenomena, then they can be dispensed with since any chain of laws and interpretive statements establishing such a connection should then be replaceable by a law which directly links observational antecedents to observational consequents.”
—C.G. (Carl Gustav)