[HN Gopher] 'The Man Who Organized Nature': Linnaeus
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'The Man Who Organized Nature': Linnaeus
Author : andrewl
Score : 25 points
Date : 2023-07-17 11:19 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| I actually first heard about Linnaeus when reading up on the Tafl
| family of board games[0]. These are a number of related board
| games that were played primarily in Viking and Celtic societies.
| The games pre-date chess and were ultimately replaced by it as
| the board game of choice in those societies. Very little is known
| about the actual rules observed by players at the time. The most
| complete account we have is a journal written by Linnaeus in
| 1732, when he observed a variant being played by the Sami people
| in northern Scandinavia.
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafl_games
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| To organize nature is to destroy nature.
| bouvin wrote:
| Melvyn Bragg and his guests recently covered Linnaeus on In Our
| Time [1].
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001l291
| timruffles wrote:
| If you live in or near London, go for a (free) tour of the
| Linnean Society. Worth it to see his beautiful notebooks alone.
| Also learned that he included phoenixes in his original taxonomy!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animalia_Paradoxa
| dmaa wrote:
| Whenever I see Linnaeus, I am accorded to this study of latinised
| surnames in modern Sweden and how they can be used to 'measure'
| social mobility:
|
| https://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Swede...
| archo wrote:
| https://archive.is/FHE5L
| adrian_b wrote:
| The title of the biographic book, "The Man Who Organized Nature",
| is very appropriate for Linnaeus, whose contribution to the
| development of biology and mineralogy is the most important after
| those of Aristotle and Theophrastus.
|
| Nevertheless "Linnaeus the Namer", which is used by WSJ, is very
| poorly chosen as an expression for showing respect to him.
|
| The reason is that even if Linnaeus has coined thousands of names
| for identifying precisely the species of living beings, this was
| by far the worst part of his work, because many of those names
| were based on confusions and mistakes.
|
| Unfortunately, we are stuck with the wrong names given by
| Linnaeus, because the rules for priority of the older names in
| biological nomenclature go only back down to Linnaeus in 1758, so
| even when many other authors have used better names before 1758,
| they do not have priority, while the better names used by other
| authors after Linnaeus have been discarded, because Linnaeus was
| earlier. So according to the rules, the names chosen by Linnaeus
| have priority both against earlier and against later authors.
|
| Most of the wrong names given by Linnaeus are Greek. It seems
| that he had poor knowledge of ancient Greek, so when he took a
| lot of names from Aristotle and Theophrastus, he made a lot of
| confusions exchanging many names between themselves.
|
| As just a pair of examples of the very many mistakes, Linnaeus
| named the capricorn beetle as "Cerambyx", but in Greek "Cerambyx"
| was the name of the stag beetle, and he also named a species of
| true shrimps as "crangon", while in Greek "crangon" was the name
| of the mantis shrimp. Even if in English the mantis shrimp has
| "shrimp" in its name, it is only extremely distantly related to
| the true shrimps. Their ancestors had already separated at a time
| when e.g. the ancestors of humans and snakes were still
| identical.
|
| Among the names of plants, the most obvious mistakes were that he
| applied many ancient Greek names to plants brought from America,
| so, for the plants which originally had those names, different
| new names had to be coined. For instance, Linnaeus named the
| maize as "Zea", but in Greek "Zea" was the name for emmer wheat.
|
| Linnaeus has done a huge amount of work, so it is understandable
| that he was sometimes lazy and he did not stop to read carefully
| the old works to see the meaning of the words used there.
| Therefore his many mistakes are easily forgiven.
|
| The only problem is that it was not accepted early enough that
| such mistakes should be corrected instead of being followed
| blindly. Now, after the words chosen by Linnaeus have been used
| with the new altered meaning for more than 200 years, it has
| become impossible to ever change them.
|
| Nowadays this remains a problem only for whoever reads books that
| are older than 1758, because there one may encounter names that
| are now familiar with the meaning given by Linnaeus, but which
| then had a different meaning.
|
| The worst appears in some commentaries about Ancient Greek texts,
| when the modern authors encounter some of the scientific names
| used today and they mistakenly believe that the words have the
| modern meaning and they present various arguments based on such
| wrong premises, which lead to ridiculous conclusions.
| Agentlien wrote:
| Another interesting mistake is Capsicum annuum, the most common
| species of chilli peppers. The name indicates that it's annual,
| but it is actually perennial.
|
| Carl von Linne first came across it in the Swedish province
| Scania where it was cultivated by monks but couldn't survive
| the cold winters.
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