My name, my species.

I read a report today on a new website that's just been launched...nameaspecies.com. The basic idea behind it is: a scientists describes a new species, they sell the 'rights' to name it to this company who marks up the value and sells it to you for you to name it whatever you'd like. You get a letter of thanks from the scientist and an official certificate of the species name! They claim that half the profits will be going to fund more research to the selling scientist.

What is stopping an egotistical scientist (or just someone who wants a cheap dollar) from describing a bogus species and selling you the rights to its naming? As far as I can tell, the site offers to quality assurance other than saying that they will publish the species in a peer reviewed journal. However, not all peer reviewed journals are created equal--so I'm still pretty skeptic. Fraudulent species describing happens all the time--especially when entomologists are selling their private collections to museums or others--as rare, endangered, undescribed, or extinct species can bring in large amounts of money and artificially inflating the value of a collection is a pretty sneaky way to sell.

The only good I see in this 'service' is that it's promoting awareness of biodiversity...but at the same time I also see it as proliferating the idea of man's dominance over nature...and now we resort to 'buying' a sense of control?

I'm not sure why I wrote about this...maybe because I was just half-surprised when I saw the news...