Carl Linnaeus Set Out to Label All of Life
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
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.
I love Wilson and in particular his prose, but he never himself seemed to get very far into any sort of "understanding" type of consilience himself (he was a professional scientist after all).
Your quote from him reads like someone looking back on a past personal realization of a significant paradigm shift and expansion of perspective when they are themselves at the same time already of a bygone era blindly living in a lower dimension (as are most).
Divulgation is a separate activity from research.
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.
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.