9 ms·

Carl Linnaeus Set Out to Label All of Life

47 points by Petiver 3y ago

kitanata 3y ago
[flagged]
naillo 3y ago
You can just smell that this is a book ad from the title
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jrussino 3y ago
  http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html 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.
  - TZubiri 3y ago
    It is possible to be overly cynical, this is not a huge industry pushing the same product again and again, it's a dude who wrote a book about Linnaeus
    - jhbadger 3y ago
      Exactly. The New Yorker's audience is people who like to read. It isn't that publishers are paying them to run these articles -- they are there because knowing about interesting new books is on topic for the magazine.
      - TZubiri 3y ago
        It's possible that there is an exchange of money I guess, and a promotional nature to the article. Not surprised that a free media distributed over the internet is funded by sponsors. It's also super transparent, high quality, and harmless, definitely not the most egregious example the article was referring to.
- tempaway47811 3y ago
  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?
- madcaptenor 3y ago
  The New Yorker runs a lot of these, it's not a secret.
- klenwell 3y ago
  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.
anoncow 3y ago
What would Linnaeus be today? I can imagine him tweeting his discoveries and a YouTube channel.
- mdp2021 3y ago
  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.
- eichin 3y ago
  "sponsor my channel and get 3 species named after you!"
- contingencies 3y ago
  Probably distinguished faculty at some second-rate tertiary institution mired in paper milling, taking out frustration as a volunteer taxonomist at iNaturalist.
klenwell 3y ago
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.
- lordgrenville 3y ago
  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/#NatuKindReal https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-kinds/#NatuKindRe...
- 3y ago

47 points by Petiver 3y ago

kitanata 3y ago

[flagged]

naillo 3y ago

You can just smell that this is a book ad from the title

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jrussino 3y ago
http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html 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.
- TZubiri 3y ago
  It is possible to be overly cynical, this is not a huge industry pushing the same product again and again, it's a dude who wrote a book about Linnaeus
  - jhbadger 3y ago
    Exactly. The New Yorker's audience is people who like to read. It isn't that publishers are paying them to run these articles -- they are there because knowing about interesting new books is on topic for the magazine.
    - TZubiri 3y ago
      It's possible that there is an exchange of money I guess, and a promotional nature to the article. Not surprised that a free media distributed over the internet is funded by sponsors. It's also super transparent, high quality, and harmless, definitely not the most egregious example the article was referring to.
tempaway47811 3y ago
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?
madcaptenor 3y ago
The New Yorker runs a lot of these, it's not a secret.
klenwell 3y ago
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.

anoncow 3y ago

What would Linnaeus be today? I can imagine him tweeting his discoveries and a YouTube channel.

mdp2021 3y ago
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.
eichin 3y ago
"sponsor my channel and get 3 species named after you!"
contingencies 3y ago
Probably distinguished faculty at some second-rate tertiary institution mired in paper milling, taking out frustration as a volunteer taxonomist at iNaturalist.

klenwell 3y ago

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.

lordgrenville 3y ago
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/#NatuKindReal https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-kinds/#NatuKindRe...
3y ago