[HN Gopher] Carl Linnaeus Set Out to Label All of Life
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Carl Linnaeus Set Out to Label All of Life
Author : Petiver
Score : 39 points
Date : 2023-08-15 02:22 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| klenwell wrote:
| E.O. Wilson does a wonderful job in the opening of his book
| Consilience illustrating the philosophical tension between the
| Realists (Linnaeans) and Nominalists (Darwinists) that the New
| Yorker reviewer zeroes in on:
|
| _My intellectual world was framed by Linnaeus, the eighteenth-
| century Swedish naturalist who invented modern biological
| classification. The Linnaean system is deceptively easy. You
| start by separating specimens of plants and animals into species.
| Then you sort species resembling one another into groups, the
| genera. Examples of such groups are all the crows and all the
| oaks. Next you label each species with a two-part Latinized name,
| such as Corvus ossifragus for the fish crow, where Corvus stands
| for the genus--all the species of crows--and ossifragus for the
| fish crow in particular. Then on to higher classification, where
| similar genera are grouped into families, families into orders,
| and so on up to phyla and finally, at the very summit, the six
| kingdoms--plants, animals, fungi, protists, monerans, and
| archaea. It is like the army: men (plus women, nowadays) into
| squads, squads into platoons, platoons into companies, and in the
| final aggregate, the armed services headed by the joint chiefs of
| staff. It is, in other words, a conceptual world made for the
| mind of an eighteen-year-old.
|
| I had reached the level of the Carolus Linnaeus of 1735 or, more
| accurately (since at that time I knew little of the Swedish
| master), the Roger Tory Peterson of 1934, when the great
| naturalist published the first edition of A Field Guide to the
| Birds. My Linnaean period was nonetheless a good start for a
| scientific career. The first step to wisdom, as the Chinese say,
| is getting things by their right names.
|
| Then I discovered evolution. Suddenly--that is not too strong a
| word--I saw the world in a wholly new way. This epiphany I owed
| to my mentor Ralph Chermock, an intense, chain-smoking young
| assistant professor newly arrived in the provinces with a Ph.D.
| in entomology from Cornell University. After listening to me
| natter for a while about my lofty goal of classifying all the
| ants of Alabama, he handed me a copy of Ernst Mayr's 1942
| Systematics and the Origin of Species. Read it, he said, if you
| want to become a real biologist._
| arisbe__ wrote:
| > "if you want to be come a real biologist"
|
| I love Wilson and in particular his prose, but he never himself
| seemed to get very far into any sort of "understanding" type of
| consilience himself (he was a professional scientist after
| all).
|
| Your quote from him reads like someone looking back on a past
| personal realization of a significant paradigm shift and
| expansion of perspective when they are themselves at the same
| time already of a bygone era blindly living in a lower
| dimension (as are most).
| Angostura wrote:
| What was the nature of lower dimension he was trapped in, in
| your opinion?
| lordgrenville wrote:
| For anyone curious to hear more (or a bit confused by this, as
| I was), this is a helpful primer:
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-kinds/#NatuKindRe...
| anoncow wrote:
| What would Linnaeus be today? I can imagine him tweeting his
| discoveries and a YouTube channel.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| There existed profiles, and certainly they still survive, in
| relative shadow, that were more interested in their own
| solitary focused activity.
|
| Divulgation is a separate activity from research.
| contingencies wrote:
| Probably distinguished faculty at some second-rate tertiary
| institution mired in paper milling, taking out frustration as a
| volunteer taxonomist at iNaturalist.
| eichin wrote:
| "sponsor my channel and get 3 species named after you!"
| naillo wrote:
| You can just smell that this is a book ad from the title
| jrussino wrote:
| http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
|
| For as many times as I have read and re-read that essay, I find
| that I still need to be reminded just how pervasive this sort
| of thing is.
| klenwell wrote:
| I take it you didn't sniff any deeper. From the text:
|
| _Gunnar Broberg's biography dutifully accompanies Linnaeus
| every step of the way, trekking through his life for four-
| hundred-plus pages. These are not, unfortunately, a pleasure to
| read... The main problem with "The Man Who Loved Nature,"
| though, is not all the things in it we don't need to know but
| all the things we need to know that aren't in it._
|
| It's a book review.
| tempaway47811 wrote:
| _A new biography, "The Man Who Organized Nature" (Princeton),
| written by Gunnar Broberg and translated from the Swedish by
| Anna Paterson, attempts to provide the fullest possible account
| of his life yet fails to grapple with the fundamental question
| it raises: if categorization is crucial to making sense of the
| world, how should we classify Carl Linnaeus?_
| [deleted]
| madcaptenor wrote:
| The New Yorker runs a lot of these, it's not a secret.
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