Ranunculus revision?
Jane McGary (Fri, 20 Jul 2007 08:44:57 PDT)

Jan Agoston's post seems to imply that the genus Ficaria as a split from
Ranunculus is a name used primarily by botanists in the former Soviet
sphere of influence. Am I understanding this correctly? (I hope so.) When I
Googled Ficaria verna and F. kochii, I found several scientific papers,
mostly having to do with medicinal compounds, using this name. It's
possible they were relying on Russian taxonomy, where we often find splits
that are not generally recognized elsewhere. SImilar disagreements exist in
Chinese and Japanese floras (e.g., Ohwi's Flora of Japan).

Someone once told me (I don't know whether this is true) that Soviet
botanists were encouraged by the government, their employer, to propose
numerous new taxa for ideological reasons. I recall that in linguistics
there were ideological pressures on academics to produce results that would
not have passed international peer review; perhaps the situation in botany
was similar. There's also a tendency in some areas that aren't controlled
so intensively to stress the uniqueness of the regional flora, perhaps
reflecting a theme of regional cultural uniqueness (and, presumably,
superiority); for instance, claims that a population of humans is
biologically different from other populations, or that its language is
unrelated to any other. Taxonomy (the "folk" kind, not the scientific kind,
but there's probably an intellectual connection) is in fact studied as part
of the subdisciplines of semantics and lexicography.

Jane McGary
Northwestern Oregon, USA

At 11:06 AM 7/20/2007 -0400, you wrote: