I don't think it's a real problem. It's a way that one group of humans agreed to label things, and that way is the currently dominant way. Even the agreed rules (whoever publishes first gets dibs on the name) are just an incentive for academics to publish. If there were another labelling system, it would have the same problems and would only serve to split the humans into multiple ways of doing the same thing.

But, ultimately, the naming is just for us humans. We care, the trees don't!

To quote Richard Feynman:

> The next Monday, when the fathers were all back at work, we kids were playing in a field. One kid says to me, “See that bird? What kind of bird is that?” I said, “I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is.” He says, “It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn’t teach you anything!” But it was the opposite. He had already taught me: “See that bird?” he says. “It’s a Spencer’s warbler.” (I knew he didn’t know the real name.) “Well, in Italian, it’s a Chutto Lapittida. In Portuguese, it’s a Bom da Peida. In Chinese, it’s a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese, it’s a Katano Tekeda. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing—that’s what counts.” (I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.)

Also, a tree coordinate system? We can't even be certain what a tree is, we can only look at a particular species and put it somewhere on a tree-bush continuum.

This diagram is insane: we have trees with non-tree ancestors, and non-trees with tree ancestors!

https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th...

What specifically makes these issues, much less glaring issues?

>We could probably come up with a better system using a tree coordinate system.

I'd suggest having ones that count from origin, and other that count from present, so the current extant species would be +1, LUCA would be -1.

Eukaryot? count from origin, Beagle? Count from present.

> Names were given by the first white european man that "found" the plant, instead of the local inhabitants who have known and named the plants for thousands of years.

I see this brought up often in all sorts of contexts. It's the "if a tree falls in the woods and no one's around" thing. If some indigenous group with no writing system nor contact with the rest of the world has a name for something... does it really have a name or even exist in the global sense since no one else can be made aware of it?