Carl Linnaeus named us Homo sapiens, “wise humans,” for our unique intelligence and power of reason. Today he’d recognize a few other human species roaming Congress.

Front and center is Homo stupidus, with Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, the self-acknowledged archetype and Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., the runner-up. Gohmert blamed contracting COVID on wearing a mask. Instead of the Pfizer, Moderna and other vaccines, he touted hydrochloroquine and, then, the horse and cow dewormer, ivermectin. Moving on to ornithology, Gohmert says solar energy is an avian hazard because birds that fly over solar panels suffer spontaneous combustion. Boebert is a QAnon BS believer. After Kabul fell, in a witless attempt to troll President Joe Biden, she tweeted “The Taliban are the only people building back better.” Right. Tell that to the Afghani women.

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., are the quintessence of Homo ignoramus, vying to be the GOP’s foremost megaphone for cretinous ideas. Like Gohmert, Johnson pushed hydrocholoroquine and ivermectin. He and Greene decry vaccines and masks as an “overreaction” to COVID. Really? With more than 800,000 Americans dead, hospitals crammed and new, more infectious COVID variants sweeping the nation? Johnson’s latest prescription is a “standard gargle mouthwash” to kill the COVID virus. He missed the grade school health lesson that almost all infections occur through the nose, not the mouth. Greene protested that although “every single year more than 600,000 people in the U.S. die from cancer … not a single school has closed.” She missed the grade school health lesson that cancer is not an infectious disease. Gohmert, Johnson and Greene are exceeded in their medical malarkey only by the lunatic conspiracy crowd. Rick Wiles, a TRUNEWS host and end-times tub-thumper, says COVID-19 vaccines are deliberately laced with “an egg that hatches into a synthetic parasite and grows inside your body.” To paraphrase the old adage, you can lead these people to knowledge, but you can’t make them think.

The vaccine bashers — and here we add Rand Paul, R-Ky., Ted Cruz, R-Texas, Jim Jordan R-Ohio, Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., Paul Gosar, R-Ariz. — apparently don’t realize that they are able to keep shoveling this rubbish in Congress only because their parents had them vaccinated as children against polio, diphtheria, hepatitis B, influenza B, tetanus and whooping cough. One can’t soft-peddle this — COVID kills people who heed the GOP’s anti-vax, anti-mask disinformation and take their quack medicines. As the Washington Post’s Michael Gerson put it, the GOP is sacrificing citizens for political gain, while also claiming to be pro-life. Data don’t lie: the COVID infection rate is five times higher among the unvaccinated; the death rate, 15 times higher. The victims are overwhelmingly from GOP states, where vaccination rates are lowest among Republicans and Trump voters. The upshot is perverse: the GOP is inflicting a brutal Darwinian sentence on its own supporters.

Perversity brings us to Homo treasonus, a malevolent mating of blatant, unabashed liars, with blatant, unabashed conspirators. They have three mutations, a result of retrograde evolution. First, like mules, they keep braying “the big lie” despite countless court rulings and election audits that prove Donald Trump lost the election by 7 million votes. And despite Trump’s own attorney general, William Barr, who declared the election clean. The Associated Press just established that of the 25 million votes cast in the six battleground states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Arizona and Nevada, only a miniscule 475 are disputed or potentially fraudulent. Biden won these states by a combined 311,257 votes. Nevertheless, the braying continues.

Second, the treasonous, like the monkeys that want to hear no insurrection, see no insurrection and speak no insurrection, perfume the events of Jan. 6 as “a normal tourist visit,” “non violent,” with “hugging and kissing the police guards.” We now know from the House Select Committee hearings that the White House and GOP members of Congress planned and orchestrated a coup attempt: overthrow the election, seize control of the government and install Trump as the tin-pot dictator. Who are the traitors? So far the committee has fingered Trump, Mark Meadows, Rick Perry, Jim Jordan and John Eastman. Rolling Stone just added Greene, Gosar, Cawthorn, Gohmert, Boebert, and Mo Brooks, R-Ala., to the plotters.

Third, the treasonous are like the serpent in Eden, a cunning trickster who “promoted as good what God had forbidden.” They promoted as good what the Constitution had forbidden: the undoing of American democracy.

Finally, there is Homo patheticus, the GOP members of Congress who remain mute while their colleagues spew medical hogwash, spin the big lie and conspire to commit treason. Look no further than our own senators, Jerry Moran and Roger Marshall, complicit in their silent cowardice, afraid they might be primaried by better bootlickers at Mar-a-Lago.

— Leonard Krishtalka is director emeritus of the Biodiversity Institute and professor emeritus at the University of Kansas.