Names can be descriptive, but where possible they too should be immutable for distinction and retrieval purposes. However stupid your neighbour, he's still Homo sapiens. A bald baby called Melanie (from the Greek word for black) may grow up as a blonde, but her name does not usually change on that account. John Smith may work in an office, and Bill Clark may shoe horses, but ordinarily Mr S. and Mr C. retain their names unchanged. That is why Linnaeus, in the middle of the eighteenth century, arranged that all animals and plants should have fixed binomials. What in previous centuries could have been Rosa europaea spinosissima floribunda alba fragrans (which would have described it) had its name fixed succinctly as Rosa alba L. (for Linnaeus), even if it throws a pink variant. Even mistaken names — for instance, the North American beach vetch, Lathyrus japonica — are to be retained formally and technically.
Unfortunately, some microbiologists, who seem not to understand this neat idea, follow the medieval practice in describing, for instance, a little pink bacterium that turns paper mushy as something far too cumbersome, like Microrhodobacillobacter cellulosolytica. Entomologists, coping with a plethora of organisms among, say, beetles, tend to go in for neater names, such as Ips. (Microbiological neotaxonomists please note.) Incidentally, I think it's a good idea to spell out the names of genera on first use, as prescribed by the editors of Nature. For years I studied algae such as Chlamydomonas elegans without knowing that, among worm geneticists, C. elegans would refer to a completely different creature (although I don't think that either is particularly elegant).
