AI and Biological Naming: Beyond Names in the Age of AI

In a world of accelerating algorithms, AI and biological naming are converging in unexpected ways. This essay explores how artificial intelligence is reshaping our understanding of life—not by creating new names, but by questioning what names mean at all.

We’ve always used names to hold the world still. A child sees a yellow flower and calls it “dandelion.” A scientist writes its Latin name on a label. But in doing so, do we reveal the truth—or obscure it?

🌼 Are Names a Way of Knowing, or Just a Shortcut?

For centuries, naming was power. Taxonomy gave us language for the living world. Linnaean systems, cladistics, Latin binomials—they brought order to nature. But now we ask: Do these names help us understand life, or do they trap it?

• “Fish” describes a visual group, not an evolutionary one.
• “Weeds” ignore resilience and ecological intelligence.
• “Lower animals” reflect hierarchy, not biology.

Sometimes, names are not insights. They are cages.

🔎 Seeing Life Beyond the Label

Life is fluid. It moves, adapts, interacts. A spring dandelion in the Alps and a summer one on a Seoul sidewalk are biologically, ecologically, even genetically distinct. One name hides that richness.

AI and biological naming invites us to look deeper. We must read the story behind the label, not just the label itself.

🤖 What Does AI Do with Names?

AI is excellent at sorting. It clusters images, sequences genomes, tracks unseen differences. It can analyze more specimens in a day than a human can in a lifetime. But it doesn’t care what those names mean.

It does not ask: Who named this? Why? And what did they miss?

That is our work.

🌿 Toward a New Kind of Taxonomy

We need a new kind of taxonomy, one that sees life not just in parts, but in patterns:

• Less ranking, more relating
• Less fixing, more flowing
• Less definition, more dialogue

AI and biological naming can offer us maps. But meaning still belongs to us.