Nils, himself an amateur botanist and an avid gardener, decorated his infant son’s crib with buds and blossoms. It is a pretty bit of backstory, part and parcel of a thematically tidy childhood. Thus did the man who would name species get his name from a species. Reborn as Nils Linnaeus, he was ordained in the Lutheran Church, got married, and had a son, Carl. For inspiration, he turned to a venerable linden tree on the land where he grew up-a lin, as it was known in the local dialect. His own father had originally been called Nils Ingemarsson, because he was the son of a man named Ingemar and most Swedes used a patronymic, but when Nils went off to university to study theology he was required to choose a new surname. The future father of modern taxonomy was born in Råshult, a village in southern Sweden, in 1707. A new biography, “ The Man Who Organized Nature” (Princeton), written by Gunnar Broberg and translated from the Swedish by Anna Paterson, attempts to provide the fullest possible account of his life yet fails to grapple with the fundamental question it raises: if categorization is crucial to making sense of the world, how should we classify Carl Linnaeus? But the details of his life and the nature of his scientific contributions are both less contemplated and more complicated, with his staunchest defenders characterizing him as an Enlightenment-era genius who paved the way for Charles Darwin, and his fiercest critics casting him as one of history’s most influential racists. Appropriately for his line of work, Linnaeus’s name remains widely known, and he is hailed in his country of origin as his own kind of rex-the King of Flowers. It was developed, as you might also remember from your school days, by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus in the middle of the eighteenth century, an era that was in thrall to the mighty project of trying to systematize all of nature. Inside scientific circles, however, binomial nomenclature still rules the day, lending concision and clarity to fields ranging from molecular biology to evolutionary ecology. Read our reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction, updated every Wednesday. Also, almost no one outside scientific circles calls the great white shark Carcharodon carcharias. rex that we speak respectfully of species that are potentially dangerous to us-not a bad policy, but also not a good argument, since a fourth example that comes to mind is Aloe vera.
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You could argue based on those two examples plus T. coli, a bacterium of the genus Escherichia.
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We know our own full name, of course- Homo sapiens, the last surviving species in a genus that once included Homo habilis, Homo floresiensis, Homo neanderthalensis, and several others-as well as that of the boa constrictor, a snake of the genus Boa, and E.
rex, I am aware of only a few that crop up in everyday conversation. rex, of the genus Tyrannosaurus and the species rex, known in full translation as King of the Tyrant Lizards.īinomial names are extremely important to scientists but rarely used by the rest of us. You’ll remember the gist from basic biology: to eliminate any possible overlap or confusion, every species on the planet, whether extant or extinct, is assigned a full name, consisting of its genus (used here as a surname of sorts, indicating to what other creatures it is related) followed by its species, with both halves Latinized, and the genus sometimes reduced to just an initial, like Josef K. That name is itself properly called a binomen, the smallest unit in the vast system known as binomial nomenclature. And here is the most surprising thing that all those ten-year-olds plus pretty much everyone else on the planet know about T. rex: the creature’s proper scientific name. In my experience, such children not only can rattle off the dinosaur’s vital statistics-fifteen feet tall, forty feet long, twelve thousand pounds-but will piously correct any misinformation advanced by their paleontologically passé elders. Last seen some sixty-six million years ago, before an asteroid wiped out three-quarters of the life-forms on earth, it is nonetheless flourishing these days, thanks in large part to Michael Crichton, Steven Spielberg, and elementary-school children all over the world. For the Tyrannosaurus rex, as for Elvis and Jesus, being extremely dead has proved no obstacle to ongoing fame.
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