Happy Birthday Linnaeus

Happy Birthday Linnaeus The great biological classifier celebrates his 300th birthday in 2007, while Buffon, born the same year and Linnaeus’s greatest rival, has been forgotten. Are we celebrating the wrong birthday? BY RICHARD CONNIFF ome and stand here,” said part scientific name, its genus Ca guide in a room on the and its species. Homo sapiens, second floor of the house where for instance, was a name the naturalist Carl Linnaeus Linnaeus coined. People today lived with his wife, five chil- tend to take his system for dren, several monkeys, parrots, granted, and scientific names and a pet raccoon. The house, such as E. coli and C. elegans in Uppsala, Sweden, is now have become part of the com- the Linnaeus Museum. “Do mon language. Of Linnaeus you feel the way the floor is himself, even biologists spe- worn away under your feet?” cializing in natural history generally know little or noth- Linnaeus stood on this ing. spot to lecture his students, in a corner of the room where the But for those who had professorial elbow naturally struggled to make sense of eases back onto the carved the world before Linnaeus, mantle. By all accounts, he the system he invented was was a charismatic teacher, cause for jubilation. “When both ribald and full of reli- Linnaeus started,” says gious fervor for the wonders Thierry Hoquet, a science his- of the natural world. The torian at the University of words Linnaeus spoke here Paris X—Nanterre, “natural inspired nineteen of his stu- history was a mess, and people Linnaeus’s sexual system for classi- dents to undertake voyages of fying flowering plants appears in the needed guidelines. Do you exploration to the far corners 1736 edition of his Species know in Greek mythology of the Earth. He called them Plantarum. Linnaeus first assigned the story of how Ariadne his “apostles,” praised their the flowering plants to classes fell in love with Theseus, and according to the number of stamens, every “immortal” discovery, or male parts, of each flower, and fur- gave him a ball of thread to and saw half of them die over- ther differentiated each class into help him find his way out of seas in the service of his mis- orders according to the number of the Minotaur’s Labyrinth? sion. His ideas would also pistils, or female parts. Linnaeus gave us the thread.” prove indispensable to later explorers, from Captain James Cook and Charles Having followed that thread myself, I wanted Darwin to biologists of the present day. to know more about Linnaeus. A good way to do it, it seemed to me, was to look not just at Linnaeus, Linnaeus was, of course, the inventor of the but also at his underappreciated French rival, system by which every living species gets its two- Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, whose “Happy Birthday, Linnaeus,” Richard Conniff. Natural History. December2006/January 2007, pp. 42–47. Copyright © Natural History Magazine, 2007. Reprinted by permission. 1 2 Happy Birthday Linnaeus encyclopedic Histoire naturelle became one of the best sellers of the eighteenth century. Both men were born in 1707, and so both are rapidly approaching their 300th birthdays. And both struggled with the same fun- damental questions, which still trou- ble biologists today: What exactly is a species? Where does one species end and another begin? How do species and habitats affect each other? Both Linnaeus and Buffon were towering figures in their day, and each despised the other. Linnaeus regarded himself as anointed by God to bring order to the chaos of creation. Buffon, who was in many ways the deeper thinker, questioned the very idea of creation and provided crucial scientific evidence against Biblical assump- tions about the age of the Earth. Linnaeus focused his relentless ener- gy on naming species and organizing them into groups. Buffon ridiculed the whole idea of imposing order on nature, preferring instead to focus on how species behaved and how they related to one another. And yet with the questions they asked, Linnaeus and Buffon together launched one of the greatest intellec- tual quests in history—to understand life on Earth in all its diversity. In place of the animal folklore that earli- Botanical expedition to Lapland, where Linaeus acquired the er naturalists had complacently costume depicted in the 1775 lithograph, helped establish repeated since Roman times, they Linaeus’s image as an explorer and proved critical to his suc- demanded specimens and eyewitness cess. Linnaeus portrayed his expedition as a perilous adventure among dangerous natives, though he probably spent only accounts. When they began their a few weeks among the Sami people there. work, the number of species known to science was no more than a few thou- sand. Today, it numbers about 1.7 million. Linnaeus Americas seemed to carry some bizarre new crea- will get much of the credit for that, in tercentennial ture: an opossum appeared on the crowded London events around the world in the coming year. quays, an iguana in Antwerp, a chambered nautilus But as I learned about Buffon, whose own ter- shell in Paris. How did such creatures live? Where centennial will be largely ignored, I began to did they fit in the scheme of creation? How did they wonder: could it be that we’re celebrating the affect ideas about our own species? Naturalists wrong birthday? caught in the tide of strange new life-forms had no language or methodology for discussing such ques- The known world at the start of the eighteenth tions. They could not agree on how to name the century did not include Antarctica, nor much more plants and animals in their own backyards. How than a glimpse of the coast of Australia. But every could they possibly make sense of species at the ship coming home from Africa, Asia, and the opposite ends of the Earth? Happy Birthday Linnaeus 3 Linnaeus was hardly an obvious candidate to in bed with one husband (two pistils and one provide the answer. He was a provincial, descended stamen). from four generations of Lutheran parsons in the Swedish countryside. But he was a careful observer Sex undoubtedly attracted newcomers to the of plants and animals, and compulsively organized charms of botany, and the simplicity of the about recording his observations. He was also ambi- Linnaean system gave them confidence in their tious and spectacularly egotistical (“Nobody has identifications. The French philosopher Jean- been a greater botanist or zoologist,” he once Jacques Rousseau later celebrated the Linnaean sys- wrote). By the age of twenty-five he had already tem as a source of “great pleasure,” because the completed an expedition to Lapland, sponsored by layperson was no longer confined to making isolat- the Royal Society of Science in Uppsala. He later ed observations. Testimonials of delight and grati- depicted his journey as a perilous adventure among tude arrived from around the world. By the time he dangerous natives in uncharted regions. But in her was thirty-three, Linnaeus was already boasting that 1999 biography, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation, the scholars abroad regarded him on a par with Newton historian Lisbet Koerner of Imperial College and Galileo. London concludes that he probably spent no more than a few weeks among the Sami people there. He Then, as now, Uppsala was a college town of also claimed double the distance he actually trav- pink-, cream-, and ochre-colored buildings arranged eled, possibly because he was being paid by the around a pretty little river, the Fyrisån. The garden mile. where Linnaeus practiced his craft as a botanist and as a professor at Uppsala University His image as an explorer proved critical to his occupies much of a city block in the middle of town, success. In Amsterdam, London, and Paris, he with his house on one corner. From here, Linnaeus dressed in a showy variation on the native costume used to lead regular collecting excursions into the of the Sami. Together with his buoyant personality, local countryside joined by as many as 300 people the figure he cut gained him entrée with the leading at a time. With his characteristic passion for order, scientists of the day. He quickly impressed his new Linnaeus organized them into platoons. They armed friends with his ideas about the classification of themselves with butterfly nets and carried their tro- species, which he published as Systema naturae, at phies home pinned to their hats. Kettle drums and the age of twenty-eight. hunting horns announced their jubilant return at the end of the day, accompanied by cries of “Long Live The Linnaean system incorporated three Linnaeus!” important innovations, none of them completely original. First, Linnaeus classified flowering plants From the start, Linnaeus also attracted critics. according to the number of stamens and pistils, the The German botanist Johann Georg Siegesbeck male and female parts, in each flower. Such a sim- protested that Linnaeus was turning innocent flower plistic sexual system was, he knew, artificial (other gardens into beds of harlotry. Linnaeus, who suf- botanists soon replaced it with a reliance on a fered criticism poorly, responded by giving the broader range of traits). But it instantly opened up name Siegesbeckia to a small, foul-smelling weed. the botanical world to anyone who could look into a Another vocal critic, though not on sexual grounds, flower and count. Second, he devised precise rules was the French naturalist Buffon. for describing any species, which, again, even beginners could follow. And third, he gradually he Jardin des Plantes in Paris is today an introduced his binomial system. A species that used Tenclosed compound of rose gardens, tree-lined to suffer under the name Arum summis labris degus- alleys, and museums about the natural world.

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