Could a single person possibly write an account of the entire Kingdom of Creation? To the man in Uppsala already attempting to do so, this did not read as hyperbole. Up until now Linnaeus had garnered critics, not competitors. Buffon had ample resources to command — his own fortune, his large staff of assistants and subordinates, and the prestige and backing of King Louis XIV. French naval officers now had standing orders to collect specimens for the Jardin during their voyages; all French physicians working abroad were strongly encouraged to submit specimens as well. Linnaeus had a significant head start, but Buffon could simply outwork him, fitting all the pieces together in a more consistent and logical manner.
Every Living Thing has everything I like going for it: It’s a well-written and fascinating history of those rarely-examined events that led to the society in which we find ourselves today. As it happened, both Carl Linnaeus in Sweden and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in France determined to name and categorise every living thing on Earth (after all, how many could there be if they could fit, in pairs, on the Biblical Ark?) in the mid-18th century, and each of them would go on to spend their entire lives in the effort. Author Jason Roberts weaves a compelling biography for each of these proto-biologists — they couldn’t have come from more different backgrounds, and Roberts has a clear favourite between them — and as their legacies unspool into the modern day, it’s discouraging (if not surprising) to learn why the lesser, more cumbersome/inaccurate system for categorisation became our standard. This is exactly to my tastes and I could not have asked for more. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
In this new age of expansion, classification became another form of conquest. What better way to “civilize” a region than to inventory its flora and fauna, scouring them of native names and naming them anew? British naval ships, less burdened in peacetime, now had ample room for naturalists to accompany them on voyages. British citizens abroad, a rapidly growing colonial class, shipped thousands of specimens homeward. Seeing the value of aligning political interests with developments in natural history, the British government threw its support behind the Linnean Society.
I don’t think it’s necessary to recount here the biographies of Linnaeus and Buffon — other than to note that neither were good students, but while the former was poor and striving, the latter inherited lands and titles that afforded him the freedom to become a gentleman thinker; and when each of them found themselves in charge of public gardens, they separately had the inspiration to improve on the disorganised methods of naming plants and animals in their day — but it should be noted how restricted each of them were by the Church at the time. And while Linnaeus toed the line on Church thinking (regarding species as fixed since the day of Creation, not subject to evolution or extinction), Buffon — through observation and meditation — wrote of deep time, the natural process by which the solar system was created, the extinction evident in fossils (which Linnaeus dismissed as natural and coincidental rock formations), the obviousness of incremental evolution of species (including a common ancestor for primates; when Charles Darwin learned of Buffon’s writing over a century later, he remarked, “whole pages are laughably like mine”), the lamentable fact of human-driven environmental change, and despite very rudimentary microscopes at the time, he had ideas about cell theory, the ubiquity of single-celled organisms, and early musings on gene-like mechanisms. (But when he would write of such ideas, Buffon would then dismiss them in his next paragraph as contrary to revealed scripture and therefore absurd musings, quipping privately, “It is better to be humble than be hung.”)
It was Linnaeus who came up with the binomial naming standard for species which is still employed today, as well as the hierarchical kingdom-phylum-class-order-family-genus-species taxonomic system that we’re taught in school (even though, in his day, this nested-box system was dismissed by Buffon and others as cumbersome, unscientific, and not actually reflective of the relationships between species). Linnaeus was also the first to divide humanity in races (which Buffon also disputed as unscientific), ranking them in a hierarchy with Causasians (naturally for him) at the top. The history behind why Linnaeus’ system prevailed is a fascinating one (with colonialism and empire-building on the one hand and the French Revolution erasing the legacy of the ennobled on the other), but it’s even more fascinating to consider that we’re still clinging to this ever-more inefficient system to this day; a system so strict and moribund that while species are routinely moved around as genetic information proves relationship ties that weren’t obvious by mere observation in earlier times, there’s no process for changing the names of species — not even those misspelt when first officially recorded; not even those named after Hitler by Nazi scientists. The direct line proven between how we came to adopt this one system and the negative, and mostly unexamined, effects that this system has had on our society (even Lincoln was a Linnaean with racist beliefs that he thought were based on science) makes for the best kind of investigative nonfiction.
An NSF project called Dimensions of Biodiversity is using gene sequencing to identify species down to the microbial scale, and while it will take years for full results to emerge, project members already estimate the total number on Earth is more than twenty orders of magnitude greater than previously understood. “Until now, we haven’t known whether aspects of biodiversity scale with something as simple as the abundance of organisms,” reports Dr. Kenneth J. Locey, a postdoctorate fellow at Indiana University and a Dimensions of Biodiversity researcher. “As it turns out, the relationships are not only simple but powerful, resulting in the estimate of upwards of one trillion species.” One trillion species. That would mean we’ve discovered and recorded only one-thousandth of one percent of all possible entries in a catalogue of life.
In the end, not Linnaeus nor Buffon (nor any one person since Adam) could possibly have named every living thing on Earth; not the multitude of specimens sent to them by wide-ranging apostles, nor more particularly, the innumerous species not obvious to the naked eye (and by this I mean not only the microscopic or hidden deep ocean species, but also the fact that it took until genomic analysis in 2021 for us to realise that the “common giraffe” — named Giraffa camelopardelis in 1758 by Linnaeus himself — is actually four distinct species, “not only incapable of breeding with each other, but genetically distinct for at least a million years.” How could we have known that by physical examination — the Linnaean standard — alone?) On the other hand, this was the early days of the Enlightenment and both Linnaeus and Buffon laid the groundwork for what would become the modern field of biology; it seems a pity that of the two, it’s Linnaeus whose legacy is better known, but I am delighted that Roberts has written a book that aims to reclaim Buffon from the dustheap of history. I loved everything about this — from the narrative style to the small details and the overarching whole — and hope that it gets the audience and attention that it deserves.
