Every Living Thing

Every Living Thing is a popular science book about the 18th century race to classify and name all natural life and the rivalry between naturalists Buffon and Linnaeus.

From Sweden, we have the pompous Linnaeus who published the Systema Naturae (The System of Nature) in 1735. He created a 5-level hierarchy to classify all known plants and animals divided into kingdoms, classes, orders, families and species. He would spend the rest of his life refining this classification system and classifying all the new species that were being discovered around the world. In hindsight, his most controversial move would be to divide humans into 4 races to which he attached stereotypical characteristics.

In France of the same era, we have eminent naturalist Buffon who started publishing volumes of his epic Histoire Naturelle in 1749. By the time of his death, this included a massive 36 volumes and would set him as the most prominent naturalist of that century. He was not only the first naturalist to write about hundreds of species in exquisite illustrated detail, but he also questioned the Linnaean taxonomy, racial categorization of humans, slavery, virginity, evolution, extinction and the Genesis.

These two naturalists would fight a battle of thoughts through most of this century while pushing the boundaries of natural discovery and the creation of whole new areas of science. The book also goes into the French revolution and the rise in popularity of Linnaeus after that. It also put into perspective Darwin, Huxley, Mendel and the arrival of evolution at the gates of science.

This book by Jason Roberts is thoroughly referenced and detailed and is in a similar vein to The Discovery of Nature which is about Humboldt. I loved that it helped place all of these happenings in natural history in the right historical context. I also learnt a ton of etymology behind the common words in science and their historical origins. Buffon’s work and life is unbelievably massive and it is not surprising that he is considered France’s most eminent man of science. The book has a lot of the illustrations of the men and the creatures of that era, but I felt that it could have used more. The biggest problem is that, yet again, we have an author who knows too much and forces us to read about every single acquaintance, correspondence and happening of their lives. This book could have been condensed down from its 400 pages down to 300 easily and would have been a fantastic recommendation.

Rating: 3/5

Excerpts

Buffon famously read drafts aloud to friends, asked them to paraphrase what they heard, then rewrote anything muddled or misunderstood, a process he repeated up to seventeen times for a single chapter. Good writing is good thinking, good awareness, and good execution, all at once was his dictum.

To say that Histoire Naturelle was a bestseller is an understatement. Hailed as both a landmark of science and a work of literature, it was a publishing phenomenon that made Buffon the most popular nonfiction author in French history. Each new volume’s release sparked a flurry of sales and a round of public debate.

The family had no name. This was common in rural Sweden, where surnames were rarely necessary; one’s lifelong presence on ancestral land served as identity enough. Most males, when required to provide one, adopted the simple patronymic of adding -son to their father’s given name, a practice that would eventually populate Sweden with a healthy percentage of Johannsons, Petersons, and Svensons. But in the fall of 1690, a sixteen-year-old named Nils made a different choice. Instead of becoming Nils Ingemarsson, he decided to commemorate his family’s tree by adopting the surname Linnaeus. It meant man of the linden tree, not in Swedish but in Latin.

Many professional scholars adopted Latin versions of their surnames, which is why Michel de Nostredame is better known as Nostradamus, and why Nikolaj Kopernik is remembered as Nicolaus Copernicus.

Aside from a few items such as tincture of opium, drugs in the modern sense of the term did not exist. In their place was an arsenal of salves, poultices, elixirs, and other concoctions collectively known as physicks, a term that gave rise to calling the doctors who applied them physicians.

One of the books he’d read during his Dijon self-exile was Analysis of the Infinitely Small, an early French treatise on the new mathematics of calculus. It was his first encounter with Sir Isaac Newton.

In the Europe of 1731, higher education remained rooted in the practical. The professor of mathematics, for instance, taught the subject of geometry through the task of building fortresses, then through an analysis of artillery trajectories needed to destroy them. Learning not only had purpose at its core, it was also demarcated differently. Today we make distinctions between sciences and humanities, but in Buffon’s time the great division was between history and philosophy. Both words had very different meanings than they have today. In the modern sense, history means things that happened in the past, while philosophy means concepts and ideas relevant to existence. At the time, history meant all that was tangible, occurring in observable reality—things as well as events. Conversely, philosophy concerned itself with the intangible—ideas and principles, which might manifest themselves in the physical world but exist on their own as abstractions. History and philosophy were in turn bisected by a single criterion: whether or not they pertained to humans. The word natural was applied to all non-human phenomena. This reflected an important divide in the perceived nature of knowledge. Botany and zoology, both studies of living things, came under the rubric of natural history, a label that also encompassed astronomy (the sky above) and mineralogy (the earth below). Yet theorizing—seeking to understand why life manifested and behaved as it did—belonged to the entirely different discipline of natural philosophy, where it kept company with mathematics and what we know today as physics. Natural historians surveyed and catalogued, leaving principles to be discerned by natural philosophers. The quantitative and the qualitative were separate realms.

What happens when you can’t count all possible outcomes? Buffon invited his audience to imagine a needle tossed onto a square-tiled floor. What are the odds of it landing so that it intersects a tile’s edge? Calculating all the permutations, every single possible site and angle of a dropped needle, becomes a task that quickly approaches infinity. Does that mean the odds are unknowable? Not at all, Buffon asserted. Take an entire box of needles and dump them on the floor, he directed, so that they scatter in a single layer. Count the number of needles crossing a tile, then gather them up. Toss and count them again. Repeat a dozen times, or a hundred. Average up the results of each toss and count, and you begin to arrive at an approximation. The full power of Buffon’s insight, however, became clear when he pointed out the process could be reversed. Want to count all the needles in a very large box? Instead of laboriously tallying them all, it’s a much quicker matter to scatter them all on the tiles, then count only the intersecting ones.

Our current popular understanding [of the word species] is that it means a particular kind of lifeform that exists as a distinct population, one capable of propagating itself over time. To Linnaeus’s generation, the concept was far more fluid. The word is simply Latin for appearance. When a botanist used the term species in 1729, it was a shorthand for plants that have this appearance.

We take as a given that each species has a representative population, and that this population is subject to change. If meaningful differences arise in the population [of a species] over a long span of generations we call that process evolution. If evolution produces profound enough changes, we declare that population a new and different species. If a population no longer maintains itself, we say the species ends. This process we call extinction.

Genesis, the first book of the Bible, establishes a strict sequence for the arrival of life. It attests that after spending the initial day separating darkness from light, God devoted the second day to raising up dry land, naming it Earth, and willing into existence the very first lifeforms: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it. Summoning two great lights (the sun and moon), adding stars, and fixing them in the appropriate places occupied the third day. On the fourth day, to populate the newly wrought sea and sky, God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. Land-based creatures were the sixth day’s agenda, the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. Later that day, the Lord capped off His work by creating humans, then bidding them to fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth. Plants and trees on the second day. Birds, fish, and sea monsters on the fourth. All other organisms on the sixth. By the dawn of the seventh day, Creation was complete. Thereafter the tableau of existence was static.

In Systema Naturae, Linnaeus divided his subject into 3 kingdoms. Minerals grow; Plants grow and live; Animals grow, live and have feeling, he wrote. He broke animals into classes—fish, birds, amphibians, insects. Drilling down further, he made divisions based on a prominent physical characteristic—the size and shape of birds’ beaks, for instance—which he called orders. He further clustered these into groupings based on physical similarities, which he termed genera (plural of genus, a Latin word meaning family or type). Finally he arrived at the specific: the category he labeled species, meaning that which could be represented by a single individual organism. Kingdoms, classes, orders, genus, species. Linnaeus firmly believed that these five nested boxes sufficed to contain all animal life.

On the fifth and final hierarchy—the level of species—Linnaeus applied only single-word names. For humans, Linnaeus did not choose the Latin word Humanus but instead Homo, a word the Romans had cribbed from the Greeks, literally meaning of the same but understood in Latin as man. Of the 549 species described in the first edition of Systema Naturae, Linnaeus knew Homo was the most controversial listing of all. It was treading in dangerous waters to place humans in the animal kingdom, much less in the same genus as sloths and baboons.

The 78-page 2nd edition included anteaters alongside the sloths, monkeys, apes, and humans in the order Anthropomorpha. Far more significantly, the description of the species Homo now included the phrase homo variat: Man varies. What followed were four fateful entries: Europaeus albus (White European), Americanus rubescens (Red American), Asiaticus fuscus (Tawny Asian), and Africanus niger (Black African).

In september of 1749, the first three volumes of Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle arrived at booksellers throughout France. The volumes were hefty (417,600 words long, spread across 1,600 cumulative pages), handsomely bound and printed, and bearing the pedigree of the king’s own Imprimerie Royale. Yet despite their length and detail, they examined only a single animal (horse). After an opening salvo on systemists in general and Linnaeus in particular, Buffon spent most of the first volume and all of the second putting forth his theories of the Earth’s formation and development It was not until the third volume that he took up the subject of what Linnaeus had labeled class Quadrupedia, order Anthropomorphia, species Homo.

It was an act of what he confessed as pérsiflage, a flattering but patently insincere flutter of words. The incident inspired one of Buffon’s more famous quips: It is better to be humble than be hung.

As to the names themselves, Linnaeus established a new structure. Each would henceforth contain two parts: a generic name, identifying the genus, and a specific name unique to the species. To strictly enforce hierarchy as identity, to sweep away all linguistic flourishes in favor of a simple two-part label—that was an innovation that set natural history on the steel rails of standardization.

Adanson unveiled his system of reforming taxonomical names. It operated on 3 principles, which he dubbed the rules of appointment. Rule 1: Use the historically oldest name for a species you can find. Rule 2: Name a genus after its most common or best-known species. Rule 3: Standardize spellings and pronunciation.

To Buffon, the essence of species lay in reproduction, the ability of one generation to propagate another. He logically applied this measure to humanity: Since all ethnic groups seemed clearly capable of interbreeding with one another, they comprised a single species. The dissimilarities are merely external, the alterations of nature but superficial, he concluded. The Asian, European, and Negro all reproduce with equal ease with the American. There can be no greater proof that they are the issue of a single and identical stock than the facility with which they consolidate to the common stock.

Asserting extinction as fact was controversy enough—again, orthodoxy held that the death of an entire species would imply a flaw, an error, in God’s perfect creation. But Buffon pressed on, insulating what he knew to be dangerous ideas by making them islands of text in a sea of general observations about ospreys and otters. As he put it in a private letter to a friend, One can slip ideas into a quarto volume which would cause a public outcry if they appeared in a pamphlet.

Men argue. Nature acts. - Voltaire