Every Living Thing: book report
The book is Every Living Thing, The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life, by Jason Roberts. It is sort of a double biography of Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788), but it continues to follow their legacies well beyond their lifetimes to the present. I cannot recommend it more highly.
I do not know what impression Mr. Roberts intended, but if you thought Linnaeus was a young man on the make, something of a scoundrel who might say anything in the interests of self-promotion, you might not be too far from the truth. The hero of this book is not Linnaeus but rather his sometime rival, Buffon.
But let us deal with Linnaeus first. Linnaeus obtained a phony doctor’s degree from what we would now call a diploma mill. He anointed 14 (or 17 of what he called his “apostles” (!), sent them on long journeys from which many never returned, and completely abandoned one who returned with no specimens. He has been criticized for not allowing his daughters their educations, to a degree, says Roberts, that was extreme even for the time (but he supported his daughter Elisabeth in her interest in botany. She wrote a paper devoted to what is now known as the Elizabeth Linnaeus phenomenon). Linnaeus also believed in the fixity of species, not to mention some very bizarre creatures, but in that he was probably not alone.
Linnaeus developed a taxonomy that is largely in use today; that is a major accomplishment, to say the least. After defining and then apparently rejecting some ridiculous species within the genus Homo, he divided Homo sapiens into four subspecies: in essence, European, African, indigenous American, and Asian. Europeans, to Linnaeus, were governed by laws, whereas Africans were governed by whim, Americans by customs, and Asians by opinions. Roberts notes that “apologists have attempted to absolve Linnaeus of racism,” but he insists that claiming that Europeans alone were governed by laws is a clear statement of superiority. He cannot forgive Linnaeus, who stood by these characterizations for the rest of his life. I do not know whether Roberts is engaging in presentism, but I suspect not.