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For the Tyrannosaurus rex, as for Elvis and Jesus, being extremely dead has proved no obstacle to ongoing fame. 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. 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. 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.
That name is itself properly called a binomen, the smallest unit in the vast system known as binomial nomenclature. 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. Thus: Tyrannosaurus rex, or T. rex, of the genus Tyrannosaurus and the species rex, known in full translation as King of the Tyrant Lizards.
Binomial names are extremely important to scientists but rarely used by the rest of us. Apart from T. rex, I am aware of only a few that crop up in everyday conversation. 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. coli, a bacterium of the genus Escherichia. You could argue based on those two examples plus T. 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. Also, almost no one outside scientific circles calls the great white shark Carcharodon carcharias.
Inside scientific circles, however, binomial nomenclature still rules the day, lending concision and clarity to fields ranging from molecular biology to evolutionary ecology. 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. 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. 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. 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?
The future father of modern taxonomy was born in Råshult, a village in southern Sweden, in 1707. 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. 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. Reborn as Nils Linnaeus, he was ordained in the Lutheran Church, got married, and had a son, Carl. Thus did the man who would name species get his name from a species.
It is a pretty bit of backstory, part and parcel of a thematically tidy childhood. Nils, himself an amateur botanist and an avid gardener, decorated his infant son’s crib with buds and blossoms. As the boy grew older and prone to the outbursts of toddlerhood, he could be calmed by being handed a flower, and from an early age he began helping in the garden. After his father reprimanded him for forgetting the name of a plant, he vowed never to do so again, and, soon enough, he could identify virtually everything that grew in his native region. Nonetheless, he was a middling student, and his parents were distraught when his teachers informed them that he was not fit to follow his father into the ministry. Linnaeus decided to study medicine instead, chiefly because it served as a side door into the study of botany. As Broberg writes in his biography, “Medicine demands two kinds of knowledge, of the body and of what cures ailments,” and the latter amounted to a mandate to continue learning about plants.
That proved difficult at Uppsala University, where Linnaeus got most of his higher education, and where he found the quality of the teaching abysmal; in all his time there, he never managed to hear a single lecture on botany. He did, however, meet someone who would change his life: Peter Artedi, a fellow-student and a budding ichthyologist, who, like Linnaeus, had disappointed his parents by failing to enter the ministry. The two became instant and devoted friends, and soon hatched, in the words of the twentieth-century botanist William Stearn, “the grand plan of revealing the works of the creator in a systemic, concise, and orderly fashion.” Like Spain and Portugal in the Treaty of Tordesillas, they divided up the world between them: Artedi, by many accounts the greater intellect, would take the fish, reptiles, and amphibians, while Linnaeus would take the birds, insects, and the majority of the plants, and the two men would collaborate on mammals and minerals. If either of them died before the project was completed, they pledged, the other would finish his work. That was in 1729. Six years later, Artedi, then thirty years old and temporarily living in Amsterdam, was out walking late one night when he fell into an unfenced canal and drowned.
Linnaeus kept his promise, although by then he was already well on his way to describing the entire world on his own. At Uppsala, he had availed himself of the lax school schedule to study more and more species. During a field trip to an island in Lake Mälaren, while most of the other students were picnicking and lazing about he walked, as he later wrote, the way a man might plow, “along and crosswise, back and forth, one of my paths ran hardly further from the earlier one than by two feet.” He documented eighty-eight species that day; another biological survey of the island conducted more than two hundred years later identified only seventeen that he had missed.
As word of Linnaeus’s gifts spread, he began acquiring friends in high places, including one who offered him a position delivering lectures at the university’s botanic gardens. That appointment earned Linnaeus some ire—it was normally reserved for academic elder statesmen, and he was still technically an undergraduate—but it further established his reputation as a rising star, and the talks he gave at the gardens routinely drew hundreds of people. That was in part because Linnaeus was advancing the theory that plants, like animals, reproduce sexually, their stamens releasing pollen to fertilize the ovules contained in pistils. That insight was crucial to the development of Linnaeus’s systematics; he began dividing flowering plants into classes based on their stamens, subdividing those classes into orders based on their pistils, then further subdividing them into genus and species. (The intermediary category “family” wasn’t widely used in Linnaeus’s time, and “phylum” would not be created until the eighteen-sixties.)
Useful as these ideas were, they scandalized some of Linnaeus’s contemporaries, not least because the plant kingdom, like the animal kingdom, proved to be sexually unruly. Linnaeus spoke tenderly of flower petals serving as a “bridal bed,” but close examination of the reproductive methods of plants revealed relations that looked less like heterosexual monogamy than like homosexuality, polygamy, miscegenation, and incest. “Who would have thought that bluebells, lilies, and onions could be up to such immorality?” one critic mocked.
Still, the whiff of scandal helped spread Linnaeus’s name. Bolstered by his newfound stature, he applied for funds from Sweden’s Royal Society of Science in order to journey to Lapland, today the northernmost portion of Finland—most of it lies north of the Arctic Circle—but then part of Sweden. The money came through in the spring of 1732, whereupon he set off, at the age of twenty-five, for the first major expedition of his lifetime.
It was also the last one. Linnaeus was not cut out for the kind of swashbuckling adventures undertaken by so many explorer-scientists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Lapland, he admired the native Sami people for their health, fortitude, and fashion sense, returning home with a Sami outfit that he wore anytime he could gin up a plausible reason to do so, including while sitting for perhaps his most famous portrait. But he complained bitterly of the hardships of travel—“Had it been punishment for a capital offence,” he wrote of the journey, “it would still have been a cruel one”—and vowed never to undertake such a voyage again.
True to his word, Linnaeus left his native land only once more, and not for the wilds of South Africa or Surinam or the New World, where people kept encouraging him to go, but only across the North Sea to the Netherlands, at the time one of the leading scientific centers of Europe. At a Christmas party shortly before he left, he met an eighteen-year-old named Sara Elisabeth Moraea, and just after the new year he came courting at her door, dressed in his complete Laplander outfit (never mind that some of it was women’s wear). Three weeks later, he proposed to her; she accepted, and her parents blessed the union on the condition that the wedding not take place for three years. Linnaeus vowed eternal fidelity to her, then promptly left the country.
The geography of the rest of Linnaeus’s life is quickly told. He spent most of that premarital interlude in the Netherlands, living on the property and payroll of George Clifford, a wealthy director of the Dutch East India Company and Linnaeus’s most generous patron. Linnaeus helped tend Clifford’s fabulous gardens, wrote a book about their contents (“Hortus Cliffortianus”), and astonished his fellow-botanists by coaxing a banana tree into producing fruit well north of the fiftieth parallel. (He sent the results of a subsequent and equally successful experiment to the Swedish royal family, the only people to eat bananas there for almost two hundred years.) Then, in 1738, he returned to Sweden, began working as a doctor—a sluggish career that took off only when he started treating young libertines for gonorrhea—and finally married Sara Elisabeth. Together they had a son, also named Carl, followed by six more children, two of whom died before the age of four. When Linnaeus was appointed professor of botany and medicine at his alma mater, a job he had coveted since his student days, the family settled back in Uppsala, where, between a house in town and an estate on the outskirts, they lived the rest of their years.
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