‘The Man Who Organized Nature’: Linnaeus

Whenever I see Linnaeus, I am accorded to this study of latinised surnames in modern Sweden and how they can be used to 'measure' social mobility:

https://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Swede...

Melvyn Bragg and his guests recently covered Linnaeus on In Our Time [1].

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001l291

I actually first heard about Linnaeus when reading up on the Tafl family of board games[0]. These are a number of related board games that were played primarily in Viking and Celtic societies. The games pre-date chess and were ultimately replaced by it as the board game of choice in those societies. Very little is known about the actual rules observed by players at the time. The most complete account we have is a journal written by Linnaeus in 1732, when he observed a variant being played by the Sámi people in northern Scandinavia.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafl_games

If you live in or near London, go for a (free) tour of the Linnean Society. Worth it to see his beautiful notebooks alone. Also learned that he included phoenixes in his original taxonomy!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animalia_Paradoxa

The title of the biographic book, "The Man Who Organized Nature", is very appropriate for Linnaeus, whose contribution to the development of biology and mineralogy is the most important after those of Aristotle and Theophrastus.

Nevertheless "Linnaeus the Namer", which is used by WSJ, is very poorly chosen as an expression for showing respect to him.

The reason is that even if Linnaeus has coined thousands of names for identifying precisely the species of living beings, this was by far the worst part of his work, because many of those names were based on confusions and mistakes.

Unfortunately, we are stuck with the wrong names given by Linnaeus, because the rules for priority of the older names in biological nomenclature go only back down to Linnaeus in 1758, so even when many other authors have used better names before 1758, they do not have priority, while the better names used by other authors after Linnaeus have been discarded, because Linnaeus was earlier. So according to the rules, the names chosen by Linnaeus have priority both against earlier and against later authors.

Most of the wrong names given by Linnaeus are Greek. It seems that he had poor knowledge of ancient Greek, so when he took a lot of names from Aristotle and Theophrastus, he made a lot of confusions exchanging many names between themselves.

As just a pair of examples of the very many mistakes, Linnaeus named the capricorn beetle as "Cerambyx", but in Greek "Cerambyx" was the name of the stag beetle, and he also named a species of true shrimps as "crangon", while in Greek "crangon" was the name of the mantis shrimp. Even if in English the mantis shrimp has "shrimp" in its name, it is only extremely distantly related to the true shrimps. Their ancestors had already separated at a time when e.g. the ancestors of humans and snakes were still identical.

Among the names of plants, the most obvious mistakes were that he applied many ancient Greek names to plants brought from America, so, for the plants which originally had those names, different new names had to be coined. For instance, Linnaeus named the maize as "Zea", but in Greek "Zea" was the name for emmer wheat.

Linnaeus has done a huge amount of work, so it is understandable that he was sometimes lazy and he did not stop to read carefully the old works to see the meaning of the words used there. Therefore his many mistakes are easily forgiven.

The only problem is that it was not accepted early enough that such mistakes should be corrected instead of being followed blindly. Now, after the words chosen by Linnaeus have been used with the new altered meaning for more than 200 years, it has become impossible to ever change them.

Nowadays this remains a problem only for whoever reads books that are older than 1758, because there one may encounter names that are now familiar with the meaning given by Linnaeus, but which then had a different meaning.

The worst appears in some commentaries about Ancient Greek texts, when the modern authors encounter some of the scientific names used today and they mistakenly believe that the words have the modern meaning and they present various arguments based on such wrong premises, which lead to ridiculous conclusions.

To organize nature is to destroy nature.