Ideas - What's In A Name?: The Race to Classify Millions of Unidentified Species

Episode Date: February 19, 2025

In 2023, scientists discovered thousands of unknown life forms in the Pacific Ocean. The discovery highlighted an unsettling fact: 86 per cent of land species and 91 per cent of marine species remain undiscovered. Are we running out of time to classify the life around us?

1942, Europe. Soldiers find a boy surviving alone in the woods. They make him a member of Hitler's army. But what no one would know for decades, he was Jewish. Could a story so unbelievable be true? I'm Dan Goldberg. I'm from CBC's personally, Toy Soldier. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us. Albert Einstein.

Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. It's most commonly estimated that about 10 million species exist on Earth, though some scientists put the number in the billions, most of them undiscovered by humans. In 2023, scientists made a startling discovery in the Pacific Ocean. It was at a site proposed for deep sea mining. They found a seafloor that was not a barren wasteland, but a rich underwater garden bustling with life, thousands of undiscovered life forms. We are being humbled by nature again and again, whether we like it or not. The unknown surrounds us humans.

86% of land species and 91% of marine species remain undiscovered. In 2024, scientists named a hundred and ninety new species, according to London's Natural History Museum. One was Myeloplus Sauron, a vegetarian piranha named after the main antagonist in the Lord of the Rings because of its prominent black strip and brilliant red fin. It was found in Brazil, where the building of a dam threatens its existence. The modern scientific system of naming species began in the 1700s. And the result is that we now have, I don't know, 1.2 or 1.3 million named species, but we know there

are probably five or six or eight million more who await discovery. And we don't have another 250 years' time to discover them. So the extinction rate of the species at the moment makes clear that we need to speed up the process. And I'm convinced that this is quite important. Human activity is wiping out tens of thousands of species annually. If current trends continue, some scientists estimate that a third of species will be threatened or driven to extinction by the year 2100. Making it even more urgent to find undiscovered species to better understand Earth's intricate web of life and our role within.

I think there are few aspects of human curiosity that are deeper than those evoked by looking at the diversity of life. Here's ideas contributor Moira Donovan's documentary, The Naming of Life. On the first floor of the Berlin Museum of Natural History, crowds of kids peer at the specimen jars on shells stacked to the towering ceiling. There's a lot of life, or at least life forms, contained in these glass containers. One million objects, to be exact, floating in ethanol, each with a label.

Various fish, snakes, and strange creatures I've never seen before, all on display. But that's nothing compared to the multitudes housed upstairs. Two levels up, in the hushed rooms of the museum's specimen collections, rows and rows of steel cabinets with doors that open to further wonders of the world. The museum houses 30 million specimens, but they're more than specimens. These objects help build the system

that scientists use to organize life. Describing and naming a new species brings it into existence, at least for the scientific world. Perhaps some scientists have this species already recognized, that have it in their mind or something. Without the name, it's not existing. That's Mikkel Ohl.

I work here at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin since almost 25 years. I'm an entomologist to work on insects, so that's the empirical part of my work. But I'm also interested in more conceptual questions. I'm also trained in philosophy and history of sciences. Ole and I go to one of the museum's upper floors. We enter a room full of rows of tall steel cabinets. So behind all these doors there are wooden drawers. I open one of them. In the drawers he pulls out are trays, containing neat rows of dozens and dozens of long-dead insects arranged in transparent boxes. These insects are part of the Hymenoptera collection. So Hymenoptera is the highest level of the classification within insects, which is called

an order. And so all the Hymenoptera are here. This means wasps, ants, and bees. And within Hymennudra there are different levels of classification. So we usually go down, so the next level would be what we call families. So ants, for example, is a family. And so this is here. Let's see where we are here now. Okay, so this is the ant collection and as you can see ants are small, most of them. If you look at the names here, you can

see that they are sort of a genus name, sometimes it's a subgenus, so as a lower category at the species name, and the long version of the name also the author and the year of publication where this name has been published is given. So in this particular case here, this is August Forel, Swiss-born. And so he was in the 19th century, he was a very important psychologist actually. And he was the director of a huge hospital, psychological hospital. And he was seen as the founder of modern

psychology and psychiatry in Switzerland. But besides that, he was an ant taxonomist. He was very interested in ants and for a particular reason, because he thought that the social life of ants would be a good model to understand social life in human. So August Forel, besides probably being very busy with his true job, he described more ant species than anybody else in the world. And I don't know the exact number now, but thousands of species have been described by him. So I don't know how he managed that. I mean, this is unbelievable. A little more than a century earlier, the modern scientific classification system

was first established. The work of the 18th century Swedish naturalist and physician Carl Linnaeus. During his lifetime, he set out to name and classify every living thing. Linnaeus has been called the father of modern taxonomy. Taxonomy is the study of naming, describing, and classifying groups of organisms based on shared characteristics.

It comes from the ancient Greek word taxis, meaning arrangement, and nomos, meaning law. The system that Linnaeus developed 250 years ago is still in use today, more or less, including his two-part naming arrangement. All species have a binominal name, so a process of two parts. The first is the genus name, like Homo sapiens, our own name. So Homo is the genus name and sapiens is the, well, what we say, the true species name. Linnaeus wrote down titles for more than 12,000 plants and animals. Some of them were his original names and others were based on common usage. So before Linnaeus, there were no strict rules how to coin or create names.

So everybody could do it as he or she wants. And the problem was that people wanted to explicitly describe the species by a particular kind of name. So the color was translated to Latin or Greek, then it was used as a name. And if you have more characters, the names would be very long, so it could be of several elements. So what was really important in the Linnaean system was that he said, so there's a genus name and there's a species name and this is absolutely sufficient to name the entire diversity on earth. I mean, he had a different understanding of the amount

of diversity. So in the 10th edition of the Systema Naturae. As a seminal book by Linnaeus, he had about 5,000 names and he thought it would be close to the real number. But as we know, it's completely, well, we now know that there are millions and millions of species on Earth. Right, right. But nonetheless, his ambition was to name every species.

Yeah, his idea was to name and to catalogue all natural elements. So not only species, biological species, but also minerals and everything. Still, Linnaeus' system was far from the first time someone had proposed a way to classify life. Every culture, it seems, has a way of carving up the world around them. One form of classification comes from ancient India, between 1500 BC and 600 BC. Sanskrit literature grouped plants based on how they grew, and animals based on whether they came from eggs, embryos, sweat, or the earth.

Three hundred years later, Aristotle classified 500 animals, dividing them into those with blood and those without it. And according to the Bible, it was our Christian duty to name every species. Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them. And whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name." Naming and categorizing is fundamental to our experience of existence. It's one of the most powerful things we do and a deeply held human impulse. Researchers have reported

that people with damage to their temporal lobe struggle to recognize living things, as opposed to non-living things. Take the case of a brain damage patient named E.R., who was examined at a hospital in Brussels in the 1980s. Despite having lived on a farm, he now struggled to name living things. He was given a list of common animals and plants, and could only correctly name 30% of them. He described a butterfly as bigger than a bee, it flies. But on a separate list, he was able to name 71% of tools and other inanimate objects. This suggests the taxonomic impulse is rooted in our physiology. Meanwhile, classifications for the natural world share similarities across

cultures. In other words, ordering and naming life is what the writer Carol Yoon has called humanity's umwelt, our unique way of perceiving the world, one that has likely shaped us for millennia. For much of human history, people named and classified what they found in their immediate environment, which made for reasonably short lists. But by the 1700s, that had changed as Europeans set out to explore and dominate the globe. Well, the thing that's often forgotten is that the age of exploration was actually the age of biological commodification. Jason Roberts is an American journalist and author.

His latest book is Every Living Thing, The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life. He lives in Northern California. The international trades that arose, arose entirely around the important export of biological materials and that would be the tea trade, the coffee trade, the sugar trade, even the trade in small insects that were used for food coloring at the time. The interesting thing that arose out of scientific inquiry was the concept of being able to transplant crops across the world to different areas. The idea that certain latitudes would be amenable to different crops was a scientific idea that

pretty much fueled the age of colonialization and eventually the age of exploration. So for example, sugar was originally a crop that was discovered in Arabia and the idea that you could take that and transplant it to something like the West Indies Was itself an abstract scientific concept. So that had begun to take root after You know successful experimentation as early as the early 1600s. But that concept that we're building an economy based on biology is something that really came to full bloom in the 1700s. And growing this new economy demanded order.

So before the advent of a natural historian like Linnaeus, the people pretty much approached nature on a per case basis. The idea that you would organize and make distinctions between different kinds of plants were based more on your purposes and what you were trying to do. So for example, a 1600 period book on landscaping would not make a distinction between poisonous and non-poisonous plants because it didn't matter. Whereas a

book on alchemy, a book on apothecary at the time, would very much make that kind of distinction. Linnaeus was really the first person to come along and say that there's an abstract schema of classification, but at the same point, a schema of classification that extended across all life, animal and plant life, and even mineral life as a matter of fact. Linnaeus also believed species were essentially unchanging. Yes, the basic assumption that Linnaeus brought to organizing the natural world was that all of nature was a noun. And by that I mean that he believed that it was a static creation.

That's because Linnaeus' scientific work did not discount the hand of God. He believed nature reflected a divine plan. So, for example, God created the lion as is. This was, of course, a century before the theory of evolution. The Swedes' personal motto, after all, was, God created Linnaeus, organized. Linnaeus was the son of a Lutheran minister from Sweden, and he spent his career advocating that nothing happened in nature that was in opposition to the Bible. And that meant that not only did he not believe in evolution, in new forms of life coming into existence, but he also didn't believe in extinction, the idea that any life forms that were created by God would possibly be considered extraneous

and be allowed not to exist anymore. So he really did believe that life existed exactly as it had been since the literal days of creation. And what that meant is that he had a static target. So he was able to organize and classify things based on what he perceived as their essential distinctions. His essential distinctions were physical forms. So if this animal looked different than that animal, then it was a different animal. While not perfect, Linnaeus's classification system was still revolutionary in terms of understanding the organization of life on earth.

However, Linnaeus had a rival, a naturalist in France. In truth, the best way to approach understanding of natural science in the 1700s is in terms of a grand rivalry. It turns out that Carl Linnaeus had a very clear and equal counterpart in the form of the Count du Buffon. They were exact contemporaries. They were both born in 1707. And they both devoted their lives and careers

to compiling a master overview of all life, which was a very ambitious practice when you think about it that really had not been undertaken before. Both of them tried very, very hard to encompass all of life in the work and both of them fell far short of doing so. But their reaction to the fact that they were falling short was very different. Linnaeus tried really, really hard to reorganize things and categories to make sure that they all fit together. Whereas Buffon basically became

more and more enamored of the fact that nature was such an unchangeable and difficult to know entity. And the main metaphor that Buffon used, the difference was between the mask and the veil. He believed that classifiers like Linnaeus were attempting to place a mask over nature, meaning to think that her features were clear and understandable and easily demarcated. Whereas he believed that the way to approach nature was more like glimpsing it through a veil, that you could occasionally with a lot of patience perceive some of the essential natures of nature, but that so much of it remained hidden in the course of a single lifespan. Interestingly enough, Bufon and Linnaeus were both famous figures during their lifetime.

If anything, Buffon was an even more famous figure. He was one of the most successful non-fiction writers on the planet and he was really, really quite well known. At the same time, Linnaeus had kind of fallen into obscurity by the time of his death. So it's fascinating to understand that within a couple of decades, the situation had been reversed and Linnaeus was posthumously raised to a figure of an icon of science where Buffon has kind of fallen by the wayside. And the main reason for that really seems to be the appeal of the Linnaean system.

So Linnaeus' system, which set out a rigid classification scheme, prevailed. What Linnaeus offered was a sense of certainty. He was not only willing to fix the concept of a species of a life form in and of itself, but within those five nesting boxes of hierarchy. Linaeus's five boxes were kingdom, class, order, genus, and species. The taxonomic ladder is still in use today with some major modifications. So what that allowed you to do is to create a sense of order, a sense of that there's this map of what I said were

essentially static species. And that appealed to a lot of people, and particularly appealed to a lot of people who were in the business of empire building. And one of the aspects of Linnaean taxonomy was that he ignored any kind of natural names, any sort of indigenous terms for things, he basically wiped the slate clean and what he would do is he would coin a Latin name, the so-called scientific name for a species and quite often he would name that in honor of the person that had quote unquote discovered a species.

At the very least, if the species wasn't named after the biologist that found it, it would be recorded forever that they were the first person to cite it. And so that idea that there was this sort of posterity in the works really made people enjoy the idea of sweeping through unknown lands. Unknown to the colonizers, that is. And quote unquote, discovering things for civilization. By the 19th century, Linnaeus' system was showing its cracks. Charles Darwin, an ardent taxonomist by the way, revealed that living things aren't fixed

by God, but are actually ever-changing entities shaped by evolution. The appeal of the Linnaean vision was that what we saw was what there was. In fact, he did basically say that, that everything that has been created still exists today. Not only that, but that all life forms were conveniently coded for us to identify them. The appearances were the same as the essence of the species itself. I can see the advantage of that. I can see the comfort of that. But what's fascinating is that this worldview was blossoming and really taking hold at the exact same time that evolution started popping up again in

the public consciousness. And Darwin, who was very, very cautious to bring those ideas to the fore, was basically doing it a full century after naturalists like Buffon were cautiously trying to express the very same thing. In fact, Darwin in The Origin of the Species acknowledged Buffon's work and said that some of his ideas are, quote, laughably like my own. But as we understand, the concept of evolution was controversial even in Darwin's day, a full century later. You can imagine how controversial it was a

century earlier. But at the same time that we had this static sense of life, we also introduced the concept of change and what so much of biological science between Darwin and now has been an attempt to impose this static framework over what is essentially a fluid understanding of life. If there are such things as clear species and genus and kingdom and so on, phylum and so on and so forth, then the question arises, when does one species become another one? When does one phylum become another one?

How does life go through change in such a way that we do not acknowledge it and that we don't see it? So once again, we have this sense of order that if you drill down further and further, we understand that there's still chaos underneath. What we thought was this mask that was revealing the features of nature really does turn out to be just a veil. And a final thought on the work of Linnaeus. His writing forever changed how we name and sort species, albeit with some errors and

blind spots. But his most fatal error was around people. He also sought to classify homo sapiens into four subgroups, using skin color and falsely alleged characteristics. The term race hadn't been established yet, but his classification was blindingly racist and wrong, and it laid the groundwork for generations of racist pseudoscientists. Yet despite his deeply flawed work, Linnaeus' original concept of species classification was in so many ways foundational.

Next, how scientists are trying to make a classification system as complex as the world it captures. You're listening to The Naming of Life on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on U.S. Public Radio, across North America on SiriusXM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, on World Radio Paris, and around the world at cbc.ca. Hey, Tom here. I host the podcast Cue with Tom Power. That's me. I talk to all kinds of artists, actors, musicians, comedians, playwrights, painters, you name

it. We've had Gwen Stefani, Jada Pinkett Smith, Killian Murphy, Paris Hilton, Leslie Jones, Maggie Rogers, Maya Rudolph, Tim Burton, Dua Lipa, Tom Hanks, Brittany Howard. I mean, I only have 30 seconds, so I'll stop there. Listen to Q with Tom Power to hear your favorite artists as they truly are wherever you get your podcasts. Ideas. You can also hear ideas on the CBC News app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. Human beings are drawn to classifying life.

Yet the life that's out there to classify is disappearing. Recovering our ability to name living things may offer a way to rebuild our ties to the natural world. Here is the second part of Moira Donovan's documentary, The Naming of Life. In the 1700s, Karl Linnaeus changed the way scientists named and classified life. But 300 years later, his system was creaking under the strain of new discoveries, including that living things evolved and that species were not static entries in life's encyclopedia. Taxonomy's modern form confronted those questions head on, and one of the key disruptors was a German entomologist.

It was in the 20th century, really in the 1960s, when a German entomologist named Willy Hennig presented ideas for how you actually go about reconstructing that evolutionary history. This is Quentin Wheeler. I'm a long-time taxonomist. My specialty is entomology. I study insects. And I've spent much of my career concerned with how you discover new species and classify them.

So, since the 1960s, taxonomy has really been revolutionized in the sense of becoming more of a mature science in the sense of its hypotheses being more rigorous than they had been before. That doesn't mean that we didn't get it right before. Aristotle recognized many groups that we still recognize as valid today, vertebrates being a good example. The 1960s kicked off a truly exciting time for taxonomy. And Willie Henning was a key part of that scientific revolution. Henning's idea sparked a new classification method called cladistics

from the ancient Greek word for branch. Cladistics refers to the branching pattern in the history of life. Some of the earliest approaches applying Henning's ideas describe themselves as the search for the sister group. A key way cladistics differed from Linnaeus's vision was that it was based solidly on the science of evolution. And so you're identifying which species share a most recent common ancestor and basically

reconstructing the historical story of the diversification of species within a group. And that is a great intellectual challenge because the deeper you dig into a group of species and discover all the amazing ways in which they've diversified, it becomes just a fascinating story to reconstruct how you make sense of all that diversity. And once you have that pattern of shared descent, it's amazing how all the pieces do fall into place. Taking this new approach meant a shakeup of Linnaeus' classification system. For example, Linnaeus divided the animal kingdom into six classes. Number four was Pisces for fish.

But Pisces is no longer used in scientific taxonomy since there's no common ancestor for all fish that live in the water. Today, Cletus divide fish into several different groups. Linnaeus had also put birds in one class by themselves called Aves. But Cletus later grouped birds in with all other reptiles as they're most closely related to crocodiles. We're sort of at a crossroads today, deciding what the purpose of taxonomy really is. I think one important thing to note is that taxonomy is so fundamentally different than

most other biological sciences. Most of biology is experimental. You're asking questions about how things function in real time. And therefore you can control variables and make observations under certain conditions and vary those conditions and find out exactly how things work. Taxonomists are really historians and they're reconstructing millions of years of history based on the evidence that exists in the form of the attributes of species. And so from the very beginning, taxonomy is misunderstood by the majority of their fellow biologists who sort of see it as arbitrary and subjective.

And indeed, through much of its history, there was an uncomfortable amount of subjectivity baked into it. But in this period after Hennig and after the 1960s, that's no longer the case. I would argue that the hypotheses that taxonomists deal with are as rigorous as any in science. And if you think about it, it's very easy to understand why that's so. Most experiments deal with situations where the outcome of an experiment,

there are so many possible outcomes that statisticians even describe them as a universe. And so you need statistical measures to determine whether a particular outcome is significant or not. Taxonomy, in sharp contrast, deals with far more elegant hypotheses. Most of our hypotheses are all or nothing claims. And those all or nothing claims are as rigorous as any scientific hypothesis. And the sort of traditional example given to illustrate that would be the claim that all swans are white. And you can never prove that all swans are white.

And you can never prove that all swans are white because we can never knowingly see every swan. But all we have to do is observe a single black swan and we can falsify the claim that all swans are white. And that's why these all or nothing claims about the world are so powerful in taxonomy, is that it takes just a single observation to falsify the claim. And so when you apply that to the two million known species and all the ways in which those

are grouped into higher taxa, it becomes this enormous body of hypotheses that makes sense of the diversity of life in a very rigorously testable way. In the 21st century, DNA sequencing has provided more ways to identify new species and to situate them on the tree of life. Yet, even as taxonomic methods have advanced, taxonomy as a science has been in decline for generations. A 2023 study published in the journal Diversity noted that the field's declining prestige, as well as budget cuts and an emphasis on applied science,

meant little funding was going to taxonomic research or training future taxonomists with potentially grave consequences. The authors wrote, and I quote, how could it happen that taxonomy is no longer respected as a solid fundamental science, that we ended up with a severe global deficit of taxonomists in times of a global biodiversity crisis? It is true that the number of taxon experts is declining and especially for professional positions have declined.

And there are a number of major natural history museums, and that's always been one of the primary places to do taxonomic research because the collections are there. There are a number of major natural history museums that have half as many taxonomists on staff now as a generation ago, some of them even fewer, which is really alarming. And as a student today, unless you want to do molecular data, it's exceedingly difficult to find a paid position. Meanwhile, the ability to name and classify the natural world has dwindled among the general population.

Researchers report a declining capacity to identify common plant and animal species, and even common names are disappearing. In 2007, Oxford Dictionaries cut 50 nature words, such as acorn, buttercup, and fern, from its junior edition, replacing them with words like blog and broadband. Supporters of the move said it simply reflected societal changes. Others worry the name erasures could profoundly weaken our desire to protect nature. This is the sound of a killdeer, a gawky shorebird found in the Americas. In Linnaeus' 10th edition of his book,

Sousséme Natchere, he called it Charadrius vociferus, for its strident call. In Ontario, three friends are working with a much older name. And it's a name that you hear in a lot of communities. It tends to be remembered quite often. A Jichishkwe, we call them. I'm Joe Joseph Perwanakut.

I'm from Wikwamkong on Manitoulin Island. I mostly teach about Nishnabem Shkik'i Adzu'in, our plant medicine knowledge. Even though Joe teaches on plant medicine, his longest held passion is birds. Through his work in communities, he began a list of bird names in Anishinaabemowin, the language of the Anishinaabe, the first nation's people of the Great Lakes region of North America. And while out with his friend, biologist Andres Jimenez Monge, the idea of creating an indigenous bird guide was born. And as we were talking, we were like, I think we're going to need a writer. That's Andres. He's originally from Costa Rica and now works for Ducks Unlimited in Canada.

I was like, Joe, I know this awesome writer. Let's bring him in. And Joe was like, yeah. So that's when I invited Junaid to go skinking with us. And Junaid, a pal of Andre's, said yes. By the way, for the listener, skinking is finding skinks, which is the only lizard in Ontario. And at this point, I didn't know that my best friend, Junaid, was in a Nishnabemoy lessons for the past like three years. Well, that turned out to be a major bonus.

My name is Junaid Shaddad Khan. I came to Canada in 2005 from Pakistan. I'm an ecologist by trade. I became really interested in relearning everything that I thought I knew from a Western science perspective from an Anishinaabe, Mo, specifically, perspective, because the language holds in it so many crucial details and bits of information that are, at the very least, incomplete in Western science, and at least the Western science that I had the opportunity to study.

But a project that started to write a guide of Anishinaabe bird names, so far 170 in total, has grown into something much bigger. Joe Pidawanakut. All we wanted was to be able to know which name belongs to which bird, but you end up uncovering and unlocking so many incredible opportunities and avenues along the way. Andres Jimenez-Monje. When I was in university, I took some PhD level classes back in Costa Rica on phylogenetics and systematics, which is part of what deals with taxonomy.

Taxonomy is a way of classifying life based on its evolutionary closeness. So a bee, a bat, and a bird have wings and with a certain taxonomic approach in which you say winged beings, you can put them together. But with our Western taxonomic approach, we try to understand how these characteristics emerge at different points of our evolutionary history and how those characteristics separate groups. And then we codify that based on or using scientific names and this binomial system in which we have a genus and a specific epithet. But what I learned from my taxonomy classes and systematics was that our main goal in classifying life is to understand how can we validate the idea of evolution. And I'm not saying that I'm against that idea. I'm just saying that taxonomy follows evolution in which things gradually change into one thing. So it's incredibly easy to answer what was first, the egg of the chicken or the chicken, because in order for you to have a chicken,

there had to be an egg that gave birth to a chicken, but was placed by an ancestor that was not a chicken. And so that one would have a different name than the chicken. And so it's very easy to know that the chicken was first on the egg, thanks to phylogenetics and systematics. But when you start dealing and answering, unfortunately from your Western brain, how does a Nisnabe people classify life? You I think first have to ask yourself, were they attempting to classify life and to categorize it and to put it into boxes as we biologists do?

I don't have an answer for that yet. But you do get to understand that there is a grouping and that a grouping starts becoming very obvious as you start going through the names. But that grouping might not and will definitely not necessarily be based on similar physical characteristics or evolutionary closeness. If you start decomposing the names and which other parts the names have, then you start understanding that these are not boxes, these are threads. So the grouping is more of a matrix instead of a set of boxes one below the other on a very vertical way. So rather than a series of boxes, like in Linnaeus' system, the Anishinaabe grouping is less hierarchical and more interconnected.

And I think that's where the most revolutionary aspects of this. And then perhaps you can look at it with some rose-tinted glasses. And I advise people not to, because there is a danger in this work of people romanticizing a lot of the ideas that we share, that you know, all indigenous people were so, so much better and wiser. But ultimately, what we learned from this is that they were incredibly practical. The classification system, the taxonomy, if you will, of the Anishinabek side of things, the way that I have come to understand it and see it and study it has a lot to do with remembering what that particular being gives you in the massive tapestry of

life. Whether that be something utilitarian, which is often something that you'll see in the names of plants and trees. So, you know, oh, this is the tree that you can get nuts from, this is the tree that you get this from, etc. Or it can be very connection based, which is talking about aspects of your own physical being that are being reflected by the species that you are observing. So a wonderful example of this is the common raven, Gaga gishin, Corvus corax. Nicole Cotter That would be its binomial name, given nearly three centuries ago by Carl Linnaeus.

Michael S. Lauer If you look at the names of these species in Anishinaabe moe, you don't immediately get that connection piece. You see Gaga gishin for raven and you you see Andeg for Crow and you're like, oh, okay, well, maybe there's some similarity, but they seem differently classified. But when you look at that name, Gaga Gashin, and start to kind of trace where those sounds come from, and where in the language those sounds are found, you start to discover, as Andres very beautifully said, these threads that kind of tie a lot of life together. So Ga-ga-gashini, being the raven, is connected to Ga-ga-gemish, which is the name for the eastern hemlock

tree. And Ga-ga-gemish is connected to Gok, which is the North American porcupine. And all of those are connected to your Ga-Ga-Gin, your uvula. That's the little fleshy ball hanging in the back of your throat. And so a story starts to form where the porcupine, and this is again more recent scientific literature, you can find lots of evidence for this, porcupines absolutely love the bark of eastern hemlock trees. And so that sound, that ga part in gaak and gaagagimish connects them as something that has true life or death implications for the life of not just the porcupine but also the hemlock tree.

And then ga ga gini, your uvula, is what you have to utilize in order to try to mimic the sound that ga ga gishini, the common raven, makes. So you can't describe one part of life without indicating, without pointing to another seemingly unrelated being. So if you were to look at the same taxonomy of Corvus and Ga, you would find yourself in Anishinaabe moen putting a mammal, a tree, a bird, and a human body part all into the same taxonomic grouping because they're connected by purpose and these sort of linguistic threads compared to the Western taxonomy, which has its own use, but really groups things based on, as Andres put it, like phylogenetic and evolutionary similarities.

The Anishinaabe worldview has humans fully entwined in the web of nature. Joe Pidawanekut recalls leading a guided walk in the woods and a comment by a participant. Her feedback was really fun. She said to be able to go outside and wander through the natural world and if she was using our language there would be no way that she could separate herself from everything that she was describing. So like the way Junaid connects the uvula to the crow to the tree to the porcupine, it's like everything that you speak of when you're out there is a reflection of who you are and so you cannot even begin to define yourself without having a fair and full understanding of everything that's around you outside. But when it comes to classifying life, Andres Jimenez Monge says this isn't necessarily

about replacing one system with another. I don't think there is one advantage of one way of understanding life, naming it over the other. Junaid Shahzad Khan. One of the birds that we've talked a lot about is the black cap chickadee, Jigajigawneshing. And we have one level of understanding of what that name is describing. And that level of understanding is corroborated by Western scientific research on the hippocampus

of chickadees and how it is that they remember and then also forget where they have stored food for the winter and how that evolves and helps, you know, individuals in their overall fitness and kind of keeps populations going time over time. When we dig a little bit deeper than that level, we end up in a place where Western science has just not researched, which is Jigajiganeishi is describing how this bird is really good at cleaning hides that are being dried out in the sun. Ain't nobody studying that. out in the sun. Ain't nobody studying that. I have never to this day read a single piece of literature that talks about, you know, chickadees being wild animal skin foragers. I don't know if that's even a line of inquiry that Western science went down. There are

biases in all knowledge systems and so what we try to get to is like because of the fact that we're speaking to audiences that are often ornithologists or researchers or schools, we're often in the position where we're trying to show the rigor of the work that we've conducted. But as this project evolves we we're going to end up in places where Western science is just not gone. And we're going to have to corroborate all of that knowledge and still have it stand as valid information without having that Western science component there. Maybe as our understanding of the world grows more complex, we need more forms of naming and

classifying life, not fewer. And even now, scientists are still discovering about 18,000 new species a year, while many more are at risk of going silently extinct. Taxonomist Quentin Wheeler. If we don't put a face on the species that are racing toward extinction, it's far too easy to sort of turn a blind eye to their disappearance. When biodiversity is reduced to tables of numbers, and I tell you there are perhaps four million insects today, it's not really heart wrenching to say, well, let's revise

that and say there are three million. The numbers don't look that threatening. But if I actually introduce you to individual insects and the remarkable ways in which they've evolved and the incredible things that they do in their habitats, it becomes harder to be callous to what we're losing. And I see taxonomy, one of its primary roles as we enter this era of a mass extinction is to force people to come face to face with the other kinds of living things that also share this planet.

And I just don't think you can fully appreciate or be empathetic to the plight of species that you don't know, that are just sort of abstract concepts out there or numbers. Until we've actually seen them and observed them and described what makes them unique among all the millions of living things, each one is truly unique. It's very difficult to fully appreciate what we're on the verge of losing. But at the same time, we've got the fundamental science of taxonomy that has a much broader and I would argue grander mission, which is to discover all the kinds of living things that exist on our planet and to reconstruct their multi-billion-year history and that is a huge undertaking.

Even as this task looms in front of us, our understanding of life is growing more complicated. We now know, for instance, categorizing organisms into species is not so clear-cut. Categorizing organisms into species is not so clear-cut, author Jason Roberts. And this is one of the central debates in one of the central fields of endeavor within biological sciences right now, which is to pin down what actually constitutes a species and when does that demarcation line appear and disappear? And Roberts adds, our deepening understanding of life should make us approach our classifications with humility. Take a bright yellow slime mold, affectionately known as the blob, for example.

It's a tree slime called Phicerum polysopholum and there's nothing very extraordinary about it. It was described and named and classified back in the 1800s, but it is capable of so many amazing things. It seems to be capable of learning. If you can put it in a maze, it will figure out not only how to get out of the maze, but the most efficient way to get out of the maze. You can take it and you can cut it in half and a portion of it will be able to retain the information. There are many ways in which it can display something that at least seems to be analogous

to a kind of intelligence. Robert says this points to a new way of thinking about the web of life. The question is can we develop a world view that doesn't lead to as many distortions as Linnaean taxonomy has. I think that is the essence of what was called complexism in the period of Buffon as exemplified by Buffon and the tension between the two kinds of natural history which would be the classification emphasis of Linnaeus and the Complexism of Buffon and by that I mean that Linnaeus believed that to know was to categorize that

Things were real and acknowledged only if you could place them in static categories. Buffon was more comfortable with uncertainty. He was more comfortable with surprises. That idea of being able to say there are aspects of this life form that we don't know, that we don't understand, where it fits in the world, how it's interacting with the world, so on and so forth. But that doesn't keep us from building on our own sense of knowledge.

So that idea that we don't have to move from certainty to certainty is a very big philosophical shift in science. And I wonder sometimes whether or not biology needs to do that as well. Instead of thinking of species as these particular specimens that are pinned like butterflies to the wall and neatly labeled, we need to think of them as this cloud of movement and change and we're able to attach some knowledge to them, but in other ways we need to be surprised. Classification remains central to making sense of the world, and naming in all its forms helps our beautiful, fragile world endure.

If I could encourage everyone to do something, I would urge you to get a pair of hiking boots and head out into the wild somewhere and just spend some quiet hours observing. No matter what you're observing, to spend that one on one time with other species and appreciate their amazing stories of how they have been successful surviving against the odds. And it's difficult to spend time getting to know other species intimately and not come away with the belief

that they have a right to live just as we do. And it's too easy to just have kind of a green backdrop to our lives and not really care whether it's made of a large number of species or just a handful. The more we learn about species and their morphology and their geography and their natural history, the more likely we are to value them and to make some of the sacrifices that humans will have to make to leave enough room on the planet for them to survive too. You were listening to The Naming of Life by Ideas contributor Moira Donovan.

This program was produced by Mary Link. Special thanks to David Common. Technical production, Danielle Duval and Pat Martin. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer, Nikola Lukcic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayed.