In Our Time - Linnaeus

Episode Date: May 18, 2023

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life, ideas and legacy of the pioneering Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707 – 1778). The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau once wrote: "Tell him I know no greater man on earth". The son of a parson, Linnaeus grew up in an impoverished part of Sweden but managed to gain a place at university. He went on to transform biology by making two major innovations. He devised a simpler method of naming species and he developed a new system for classifying plants and animals, a system that became known as the Linnaean hierarchy. He was also one of the first people to grow a banana in Europe. WithStaffan Muller-Wille University Lecturer in History of Life, Human and Earth Sciences at the University of CambridgeStella Sandford Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, Londonand Steve Jones Senior Research Fellow in Genetics at University College, LondonProducer Luke Mulhall

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at BBC in our time. I hope you enjoyed the program. Hello, the Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau once wrote, Tell him, I know no greater man on earth. He is referring to the pioneering Swedish botanist, Carl Leneos, 1707 to 1778.

The son of a parson, Leneas grew up in an impoverished part of Sweden, but managed to gain a place at university. He went on to transform biology by making two major innovations. He devised a simpler method of naming species, and he developed a new system for classifying plants and animals, a system that became known as the Linnaean hierarchy. It was also one of the first people to grow a banana in Europe. With me to discuss the work of Linnaeus are Steve Jones,

Senior Research Fellow in Genetics at University College London, Seller Sanford, Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London, and Stappan Muller Villa, University Lecturer in History of Life, Human and Earth Sciences, at the University of Cambridge. Staphan Mullerville, will you tell us more about earlier upbringing education. As you mentioned, he came from an impoverished region of Sweden,

Smoland in the southwest, and he grew up in very simple circumstances. His father was a country parson, but with a botanical interest, and he had a little family garden that introduced Linnaeus to botany. And Linnaeus's intellectual upbringing then follows a certain pattern. He goes to a gymnasium first in Wexchew, then to universities of Lund and Uppsala.

And at each of these institutions, he is able to catch the attention of important professors that then provide him with lodging, access to their libraries. He seeks patronage and finds it, and that's what makes him into a naturalist. So he actually visited very little lectures. He was mainly self-taught through reading and having private courses with his tutors. Because private courses were cheaper than going to lectures, were they? If you got them cheap. If they were offered cheaply to you.

And Linnaeus often was offered these private tutoring for no fee. Because you were so clever? Because he apparently had a very strong interest in the very same subjects that these university professors were interested in. And he was good at. managing these kind of situations and getting advantage from them. Sweden was in the mainstream of European intellectual thought at that time. It's actually rather difficult to single out one intellectual stream

that during the time he studied influenced him. So his first teacher at the gymnasium of Vecche, Lars Ruberk, was someone who taught natural philosophy, but combined Aristotle and Descartes, who are usually seen as opposite poles. But this was Aristotelio-Cartesian natural philosophy. So that was already eclectic. And throughout his studies, Linnaeus is subjected to various influences, including our chemical writings, mystical writings.

He's eclectic. He just picks up bits and pieces from various intellectual traditions that he then puts together to form something uniquely his. Was he known in his time when he was a young man as a very promising, bright, exceptional prospect? There are certainly those professors that promoted him certainly saw his talent and also gave him early on important responsibilities

like teaching botany in the botanical garden. Before he even had a degree, he was a demonstrator at the botanical garden in Uppsala teaching students and making some money by that, which was very handsome for him. So he was recognized, but this was, of course,

a small circle of people, hardly something that would make him world famous. And it is very clear from the start that he wants to become famous. That's interesting, isn't it? And he's a great self-promoter too. Yes. A lot of the early manuscripts of Linnaeus

during his student years are actually made up like little books with a proper title page, frontispies, page numbering, headers and footers. They are made like they are printed. It almost looks a little bit childish with the attention to detail that he pays.

But it worked. It worked for him, yes. Steve, Steve Jones, can you give, I lost over, can you give us an idea of the intellectual power in Sweden at the time? The thing which is notable about particularly biology in that period,

but also chemistry and physics, was that it wasn't particularly, it wasn't a national pastime, it was an international pastime. And we're used ourselves, you know, all the time in modern science to referring and speaking to people living on the other side of the world. And in fact, something not very different from that happened in European science. Linnaeus himself came to London at one point. So we were part of an international community. And Linnaeus, I think, gained a lot from that. And one of the reasons it was so international, of course, is that the lingua frank,

at least in taxonomy, the study of different plants and animals, was in fact Latin. The description of any species would be in Latin. So you would be expected to know Latin. We use Latin names, of course, to describe species

today. And in fact, until not very long ago, the fearsome organisation known as the International Committee on Zoological nomenclature, which wraps your fingers if you do anything wrong, They insisted that you gave them a translation in Latin of the description of the species you wanted to use.

I think we'd all be rather lost if we had to do that today. He made advances on, and you mentioned taxonomy, the practice and science of classification. Why was that so important to him, and why is it so important to us? I think the first thing you need that any science is order. If it's not ordered in some way, it's impossible to penetrate. And if you didn't have some logical framework with which to understand the world.

You're basically stamp collecting. You can see that both birds and insects fly, so they must be related in some way, you might think. And this was, in a way that people thought. They didn't see that there was a logic and a hierarchy. They simply went out and described things. And Darwin, just like Linaeus, of course, was a great naturalist.

And that pastime has disappeared. It is no longer known in Britain, as far as I know. Darwin and Linaus would go out into the field and identify a thing which I would certainly find impossible. I can assure you all my students would find entirely unthinkable could go out and identify dozens or hundreds or maybe even more. Species are both not just animals with plants as well. And his great advance was to produce this kind of cataloguing system

that made practical sense. Whether it makes biological sense is a different to deeper question. But it makes much more sense to realize that, you know, you've got two species of, say, mice, and one is musculos, and the other one is must domesticus, so you put it in Latin, and so you can order things rather neatly. Now, given what we now know about genetics,

that ordering is, in fact, in some ways, a bit inaccurate and uncertain. But if the real science is truly disordered, you usually don't find that out until you try to order it. And Linnaeus did the ordering, and he did an extraordinarily good job with it. What's the advantage of order? apart from it being neater and looking better on the page. What is the scientific advantage?

It's got within it, the idea of relatedness. And so that seems a rather obvious thing to say, but it isn't necessarily obvious. I mean, birds and flies are not related, although they do both take to the air. So ordering has the intrinsic notion of relatedness. Now, Linnaeus, I think, probably had some strange, noted of relatedness, but it was a very static one, at least initially early in his life.

He didn't make the next obvious step, which is why are they related? And what do we mean when we say two people are related? We mean that they share ancestors, either recent ancestors or distant ancestors. So that Linnaeus' taxonomy had within it the idea of evolution. And Darwin, we must remember, himself, was a taxonomist and was an extraordinarily talented taxonomist. Can you tell the list of what a species is, Is it the same in biology and zoology? I've been setting the exam question to my students for 50 years, what is a species in the hope that one of them will tell me what it is,

because I don't know. That's a bit of a cop-out, Professor. But, and if they do tell me, I fail them. A species is an odd concept because it's, first of all, a descriptive concept, okay. I happen to work on a particular snail, most beautiful, charming organism, which is small and yellow, and they've got black stripes on it. It's called Sapir Nemeralis, all right?

There's a related species called Sapir Hortensis, which can't exchange genes with it. They don't hybridise. So on that definition, they are different species, even though they look almost the same, okay? And of course we have the mirror image of that, in which you have, say, the species to which many of us claim to belong, which is Homo sapiens.

Now, if we had to come from outer space and land on the earth in the Middle Ages and go to, say, Africa, China and Europe, it would make perfect sense to say you have three species of humans on Earth, because they look different. But that doesn't work. It works only in the very shallow sense.

What you need is a biological definition of species. And the standard definition, biological definition, which again in the end doesn't work very well, I think of it as a republic of genes. If you're a member of one species, you can exchange genes with any, members of that species, either directly or indirectly, in other words, through several other individuals. And if there are different species, you can't do that. And that works quite well,

but it certainly doesn't work perfectly. Thank you. Stella, Stella, Sondland, we think that the classification began with Aristotle. How did he begin it? Well, actually, I don't think Aristotle did quite have a system of classification. In his book, The History of Animals, which is an extraordinary, quite large, incredibly rich series of descriptions of different animals, all of the different animals that he knew. And descriptions not just of their external form, but descriptions of their internal anatomy, and again, not just the obvious large mammals

that were easy to identify, but many species of fish, birds, worms, insects, really quite incredible scope in the book. But he begins the book by talking about all the different ways in which we can differentiate animals from each other. So he says, for example, or we could differentiate them, according to their habitat or according to their behaviours, or according to whether they were nocturnal or diurnal,

or whether they were gregarious or social. But he doesn't settle on any one principle of differentiation after that initial discussion. Rather, he begins to go through descriptions of large groups like birds and fish, for example, but also he's constantly comparing across these very large groups. and what emerges in effect is a series of groupings that changes according to what's being discussed, very much not a systematic classification. And it's not a criticism to say it's not a systematic classification because he wasn't aiming at that.

In the history of animals, he wanted to describe each one of these animals in as much detail as he possibly could. And some of the descriptions, including, for example, the descriptions of the development of the, fetus of the chicken inside the egg, they stand up well even today. They're really quite amazing. He wanted to describe each one of them in as much detail as he could and also to compare them to each other, often in relation to their functions. So to compare animals that belong to very different groups, according to the function of respiration or very often as well the modes of reproduction. And as he's doing this, he uses the terms genus and species. But he uses those in the way. a very general way. What does you mean by that? In the history of animals, he uses those as a way of

identifying higher or lower groupings, but not fixed groupings, not fixed taxonomical categories. So something that at one moment would be described as a genus group with species groups below it. Might at another instance be described as a species that belongs to a different genus. So the words are used relative to each other to be able to describe different groups. groups at different levels, but not in the taxonomical sense that we understand the words genus and species in biology today. So if we move on into the middle ages, a bit of fast forward. Which figures were taking up this study and how far were they getting?

Once we see the advent of printed books, we see bestiaries which describe and have pictures of animals in alphabetical order, often describing what they look like, you know, what they do, where they've appeared in myth and so on, we find herbles, which describe different plants according to their medicinal virtues, but they're quite limited those. We see, after this, people beginning to produce catalogs of local flora in particular,

because the history of classification is really the history of botany for a long time. So an interesting example is the English naturalist John Ray. He was the first to produce a catalogue of English plants, which was his catalogue of the plant, plants in the Cambridge locality in 1660. He produced a catalogue of English plants in 1677. So obviously that's much bigger than just the Cambridge plants. As the number of species being described grew, there was a need for exactly the kind of order that Steve was just talking about. So it's interesting

that Ray says in his catalogue of English plants, which he arranges alphabetically, soon I'm going to produce a general method. And then he does in 1682. Those methods now were based on different parts of the plants. There were lots of debates about which was the part of the plant that was the appropriate one for the system of classification. And interestingly, in Linnaeus' book, Philosophy of Botanica from 1751, he begins with a chapter called the library, and he gives this little potted history of systems of classification there. Thank you. Staffan, can we talk about the naming, the new naming that Linnaeus brought to this study? Linnaeus is to this day known for this one chief innovation, the introduction of binomial

nomenclature. What do you mean by binomial nomeniculture? That's the two-part Latin names that all animals, plants, fungi nowadays have. So to use the example of ourselves, Homo sapiens, all animals, all plants have to have these labels. And that is Linnaeus's chief innovation. It was formally introduced by him in the Philosophia Botanica, his textbook of botany that was already mentioned by Stella. It provided a very convenient way of communicating about plants and animals using the same names. The disadvantage was that these names didn't have any descriptive content anymore. Linnaeus has a very interesting analogy with which he describes.

this. He says that the name serves the same function in the Republic of Letters of the Republic of Botany as the coin on the marketplace. The coin has a symbolic value. It is not really essential what it consists of. And people at Linnaeus's time knew that already. So it formed this medium with which botanists and zoologists could communicate while making sure that they were actually talking about the same species or general. When he introduced this naming system, was there a sort of leap forward in the study that he was undertaking? There was a leap forward in a quantitative sense.

It became easier to rapidly produce species descriptions because everything was standardized, formalized. One could talk about a lot of other innovations that Linnaeus introduced to the practice of botany and zoology in this respect. Linnaeus himself provides a good example. He publishes, when he comes to Holland to take his doctoral degree in 1735, he publishes Sustema Natura, a catalogue of all plants, animals and minerals, known at the time. He publishes Genera Plantarum.

He publishes a species catalogue. All in all, eight books within the span of two and a half years. It's really like a man. machinery and he goes on to update these publications throughout his career, almost until the day he dies 1778. He produces one edition after the other of these taxonomic works with lots of new species that he has learned about from his correspondence, his students that travel around the world and the catalogue can grow in a new way. So often one says that Linnaeus's innovations were due because so many new species

became known to Europe in this time in the 18th century and that's true. We can measure that, but one can also say, of course, that it was Linnaeus's innovations that made it possible to discover more and more and

process that information much more efficiently. Steve, Steve Jones. In some ways, that naming system, although it's very important, it turned out to be a bit of a trap because groups that were intensely studied, and are still intensely studies, birds most of all got species names. You know, you find the blackback gull, herring gull, the other gulls of the North Atlantic, described as different species. But in fact, they can, in some circumstances,

they can hybridise together. And in that particular case, you've got the remarkable situation where we have a bird called the lesser blackback gull in Britain, and then we go round the North Pole, okay, and the adjacent species of gulls around the North Pole can actually hybridise with each other to some extent, so they're not really species. But when they've got around the North Pole and then get back into Britain, at the end of that chain, they can no longer hybridise with each other, the two that are in Britain. So what shows you evolution in action? As they were moving around the North Pole as the ice retreated, they were moving to new places, they were changing, evolving and adapting. But when they, when they closed the circle, the two at the extreme end,

and changed so much that they couldn't exchange genes. So that's the problem with species definitions. It's very easy to point at a black-backed gull and say, that's the species, or at a herringold, that's the species. But what do you actually mean? And when you look more carefully, the biology of it, as usual, turns out to be more complicated. Biology isn't like physics.

Not that I understand much physics. I'm told by competent physicists that the more you know about physics, the more you understand. The more you know about biology, I can assure you the less you understand. But in a way, taxonomists have found an ingenious solution to these kind of problems

by introducing the type specimen method, where the name, the linean names, the binomial names, are actually not attached to a species, but to an individual specimen that represents whatever species it belongs to, according to the judgment of taxonomists. And the only thing,

irony to me is that modern students of biology don't know any taxonomy, you know. I mean, they really don't. My students, I'm sure, they can probably just about tell mice from rats, but the kind of stuff which both Darwin and Linnaeus and all their contemporaries saw as biology, the description of different creatures, has more or less melted into thin air. Why is that? Oh, because Gila makes it so much more interesting. Thank you. Stelham. Stenheim.

And Inayas became famous for developing his sexual system of plant classification. Can you explain this to us? Whereas in the zoological classification, there's no one principle of division. So he divides them in different ways in their different classes. He did produce a general key for the classification of plants, which he called the sexual system of classification. And he was using that as early as 1730, but it's most famously set out in the first edition of the system of nature in 1730.

It's important to say actually that this is the scientific condition of possibility for the sexual system is the very recent discovery, as historians of botany would see it, of the fact that plants are sexed, that plants have male and female functions in something like the same way that animals have male and female functions. Can you give us more detail on that? There was a lot of talk of the sexes of plants from the time of Aristotle in Europe, But there was controversy about whether whether plants came in male and female versions. So what did Linaeus say? Once it was proved that you needed both male and female parts for fertilisation to occur,

which was proved in the late 17th century, Linnaeus was totally on board on it. Neneus was very excited by this theory of the sexes of plants. And he used it as the basis for the sexual system of classification, which in the first instance names the classes of the plants, according to the number and the arrangement mainly of the stamens in the flower of the plants. And then the orders named then according to the number of the female parts. So the first class is called Mon Andrea, literally one man or one male, as Erasmus Darwin translated it. And it proved to be a very, very useful system.

Erasmus Darwin said it was a very concise and elegant arrangement. He was very clear that at the level of the order, order and the level of the class. It was an artificial system of classification. He was convinced that genera and species represented natural groups, but it was very successful. Proved, very useful, was very useful. But it went much further than that. There were men and women there were marriages, there were incest, there were

cousins as good as knows what. I mean, he had the whole thing going to go, didn't it? It was very controversial because in one of those early pamphlets that Stefan was talking about earlier, which is called prelude to the betrothal of plants, which he wrote, It wasn't published in 1729. He defends and explains the theory that there are sexes in plants, not just by saying there are male and female functions, but with an extended analogy with human courtship, marriage, copulation and so on,

and then goes very far in identifying the parts of the plants with the human anatomy. And yes, he says, you know, the flower, the petals are the bed in which the bride and the bridegroom meet each other. This is a poetic, a quasi-poetic pamphlet written for one of his professors. And, you know, you could say it's separate from the system of classification that you see, much more obviously scientific system of classification in the system of nature. But actually he carries over those metaphors into the scientific naming of the classes. Can we talk about the hierarchy, the then hierarchy, so fun.

Maybe a good starting point is the sexual system, which is, hierarchical in a sense. It goes through a series of ever more specific distinctions and it results in a linear arrangement. If one looks at the page, one can really see that of 24 classes. And there is a hierarchy from the Monandria, which are sort of perfect, innocent. You have monogamy in human terms. And then it descends into perversion. And actually Linnaeus, designed this, I am convinced... Could you mean my perversion? You should have been an incest. Well, yeah, you get polygamy, you get forms of incest, adultery, even prostitution,

homosexuality, the further you go down. And the worst are the cryptogams, the cryptogams which do it in the dark. I'm convinced that Linnaeus quite consciously designed this as a subversive parody of the idea of a scale of nature, where you have a hierarchy of perfection and nobility. Animals are more perfect beings than plants. Mammals are more perfect than worms. Humans are more perfect than animals. Now, the linear hierarchy that Linnaeus introduced gets rid of this linear arrangement

according to a scale of nature or scale of perfection. It distributes life more in a system of, I always like to compare it a system of boxes within boxes. It is almost like it is organized like the naturalist's cabinet with its drawers, its little boxes within the drawers. It is a physical arrangement of information that is always contained within higher units of information. So a system of boxes within boxes. And what happens there is that one can look at things as being.

both equal and different. So if we take the example of a genus, then the species within that genus are sort of all occupy the same space. They are exchangeable. They are of the same genus. But of course, the genus is different from other genera, and the species, if you look at the level of species, are different from each other. So the Linnaean hierarchy conceptualizes diversity in an entirely new way, and in fact in the way that we understand the term diversity today, which expresses both notions of equality and of difference. I mean, I hate to bring in the English rival Darwin, but Darwin writes in its notes, never say higher or lower.

And that's very important, you know, because once you start making value judgments, then the whole thing falls out of the window. And it's just taxonomy. Now we know a lot more about taxonomy, but the idea of a scale of nature that somehow, as the Victorian naturalist Paley had it, that God had arranged things to have more and more complicated things

as you're going higher up the scale. That's very anti-evolutionist. I mean, evolution is a series of successful mistakes. Some mutations at random allow those individuals who bear them to survive better, perhaps in a changing environment, and so they spread. A classic example, of course,

being industrial melanism, black moths. When the trees were black 40 years ago, when we cleaned up the air, the black moths disappeared again. So it's a very flexible and adaptable system. So the whole system is constantly changing, constantly making errors, and if your errors do not succeed, they fail, they disappear,

and the successful ones continue. And that's where we got to where we are. we are, in BBC Radio here, a series of successful mistakes probably more than in many other places, but it works. Thank you. Stella, how did he carry out his research?

It was a time for great research, wasn't it, the 17th and 18th century. How did he carry out his research, and what did it consist of? He was very much a field botanist when he was young, when botany was his hobby, I mean, albeit a very serious hobby.

So he was out in the field collecting, examining plants and collecting plants, In 1732 he made his famous Lapland journey, starting in Uppsala and going around the Gulf of Bothnia into northern Sweden and then around into Finland, a very uncomfortable and dangerous journey in many ways. This field research was very important. When he was an established figure and he had his own students or apostles, as he called them, he began to send them out all over the world. Really quite astonishingly ambitious research trips to South Wales. America, North America, China, Japan, South Africa. The most famous of those was Daniel Solander, who went with Joseph Banks on Cook's circumnavigation started in 1768 and possibly set the precedent

for having naturalists aboard Royal Navy ships. Of course, Darwin would follow in those footsteps. So it was this enormously important, you know, sending people out to get the specimens. And many of them died actually and their families were very upset about it. It's also important to remember that Linares had a really, it didn't just have a scientific interest in plants. He had a very strong economic interest in plants. He wanted Sweden to become self-sufficient. He wanted to lessen Sweden's reliance on imports. He wanted his apostles, as he called them, to bring the plants back from other places to see if he could naturalize them on Swedish soil and grow them for the domestic market on Swedish soil and also for export.

Don't think he had a lot of success with those naturalization experiments, but some would even say that by the 1750s, his interest was primarily economic. Seven to come back to you, what did you think about evolution? That's quite an interesting subject because it shows an evolution of Linnaeus himself over his career. So initially he was quite convinced that species since their creation, He believed that every species had originally been created in the form of an original pair. Every species has its Adam and Eve. And then species of today are formed by their descendants, and there was no change there.

But later in life, he became convinced that there was strange over time. He observed himself in his botanical garden, what we nowadays would call mutations. And he developed the theory of evolution that did not. assume natural selection. That was a point of view that was far removed from Linnaeus's horizon, but that involved hybridization. So new species come into being by the hybridization of pre-existing species. And in his late life, he even went so far to speculate that God perhaps at the beginning only created three different species of plants and that these hybridized with each other. then the outcome of that hybridized with each other

and all the diversity we see is actually due to hybridization. What problems does he have? When you look at him now, what do you think he's failing to do? He failed to do. What problems he couldn't solve is probably a better way to look at it?

Well, I mean, his problem, is that he didn't have the most powerful tool of all, which is genetics. I would say that, wouldn't I, being a geneticist. But of course, genetics is, has within itself a structure which shows you the relatedness between species which you can't see simply

by looking at them. It shows, for example, although Linnaeus interestingly enough accepted the fact that humans and chimpanzees were related. He called them the anthropomorphic d, I think, the human-like creatures.

Now that was a very radical idea for that time to put man and chimps in the same group which it was almost blasphemous but now we see that as a standard statement. As Gilbert and Sullivan said, Darwinian man, though well-behaved, is nothing but a monkey shaved. And they were right.

I mean, we are shaved monkeys. Some of us are more shaved than others, but that's the case. And clearly the case, it would be an absolutely illegitimate experiment, but I'm willing to bet, if you do an IVF experiment with human eggs and chimpanzee sperm, I would bet my bottom dollar that you would get an hybrid creature. out of it. You wouldn't be allowed to do it, and if you did it, you wouldn't be allowed to tell anybody, but it would certainly work. Do you have any think there's anything more to say, Saffin,

about his view of human beings? The essay he wrote on the anthropomorphar that Steve mentioned is a wonderful example of how the Linnaean hierarchy works and how it works in the case of humans, because it places apes and humans into one taxonomic category. which means they are, in a sense, the same. That was the scandalous message. But of course, within that category, you also have differences. So he always insisted that humans differ from apes by having possessing rationality. That's what defines them.

The definition of homo sapiens in Sustema Natura is know thyself. It's a reference to our ability to reflect on ourselves. And in Linnaeus, that automatically means classifying. And he goes on in Sustema Natura already to illustrate that by classifying humans. In a way that is very recognizable today, he is actually the naturalist who introduces the classification of different human varieties, as he calls them, according to skin color. So he is one of the naturalists in the 18th century that contributed to the emergence of the modern concept of race. There were people who reacted very strongly against this idea, including Georges Bufant in Paris, his main rival, who was working on his 33-volume Histoire Natural.

But these reactions were motivated by wanting to stick to the idea of a scale of nature. It was just seen as scandalous to make humans and apes the same in a sense. And Linnaeus insists, he says, there is no fundamental difference between apes and humans. Can you tell us, Stella, how it affected him when he became very famous? Rousseau is saying he's the most important man on earth, which isn't a bad start. But others praise, did it change him? Did he do more work? Did he have more resources?

Well, as Stefan said, he wanted to be famous. And in his philosophy of Botanica, for example, when he goes through his classification of the classifiers, he gives himself a sort of genus of his own. He's the only one there. He's the true systematist. He had a very, very high opinion of himself. And he tended to write in the third person, didn't he,

in his diaries, which we still have. And he was not shy of blowing his own trumpet, we say. So he took to fame very well, I would say. Fame took to him by the time. Yes. Does he establish his own laboratory set of his own system? Does it do young students come and gather

around him? Does it create, as it were, following in that sense? Well, interestingly, he sends out his students to send him material, to send him specimens, to send him descriptions, but he relies very little on students to do the hard work of

synthesizing that information for his taxonomic works. He does it himself. He does all of that himself. What sort of life did he have? Did he marry? Did he... He was married. He fell in love after his Lapland journey

courted a quite wealthy young women in a Sami dress shortly before he went to Holland. Then they had to separate for quite a while, but he came back, married her. They set up a household. had five children. I think there were more births, four daughters and a son. The son became his successor. And his wife was a very good entrepreneur. She invested a lot of her money into farms and agriculture. She was actually running these businesses. Linnaeus took an interest in

the plant varieties that were grown and had its own little botanical garden to play around with. but she was a strong woman and they had a wealthy, a well-off household and a very lively where the students were integrated, there were dances, I would say he had a lot of fun. Stella, what part does it play

in biology today? I think some people would say that nothing really of Linnaeus' biology survives today except the formal aspects of binomial nomenclature and the formal aspects of the Linnaean hierarchy. And of course that hierarchy is now

expanded with lots more different taxonomical levels. But even if that were all that survived, we would have to say, well, that is an enormous amount. That is enormously important. It can't be overestimated. And there are lots of people who think that the Linnaean hierarchy is inadequate. But given that it's so tied into the system of naming, it's very, very difficult to see that that's going to change anytime soon. Linares also survives in much of the zoological and botanical terminology. that we use today.

So in the later versions of the system of nature, he introduced the idea of mammals and primates. And even though the system of the classification of plants, the sexual system of the classification of plants, didn't survive, a lot of the terminology that he introduced there to explain it still does survive. So we still sometimes talk of dichlinous and monoclinous plants, i.e. those that have male and female parts in different flowers on the same plant

or the same flower on the same plant. And we're literally saying they're in the same bed or they're in two beds. So not much survives of the substantive biology, I would say. But even if only these formal elements survive and the terminology, he could probably claim to be the most influential biologist before Darwin.

In terms of his substantive biology, all that he developed in terms of theory were really weird ideas about physiology and chemistry, and it really merges into what we nowadays would call alchemy. There's lots of very weird analogical reasoning in Linnaeus, and as a theoretician, he wasn't really taken seriously. George Buffon, his rival, was taken much more seriously. He had a theory of the earth.

He had a theory of how life evolved on earth that convinced people and that was grounded in Newtonianism. Linnaeus didn't understand a bit of Newton. But there's maybe one important exception to that, and that is, are his ideas about the economy of nature or what we nowadays would call ecology. He developed the idea that nature is a finely balanced system of mutual dependency, between species, and that is something that 19th century naturalists would still be discussing, including Darwin. It continued to be a very important idea for Darwin. So as an ecological thinker, a proto-ecological thinker, he's also very important. Finally, Steve, Steve Jones.

We're talking about Linnaeus and Newton in the same breath, and I think they deserve to be spoken of in the same breath, because if you're a physicist today, much of your time is spent, saying Newton was wrong, okay, once you get into relativity and so on. But we wouldn't have got into relativity and Einstein if Newton hadn't done what he'd done. In the same way, without Renéus, Evolution would probably not have been considerably delayed. He was the necessary soil which gave rise to the great tree of evolution.

Well, thank you all very much. Thanks, Stella Sandford, Stefan Mouloubill and Steve Jones, and to our studio engineer, Jackie Majram. Next week, the 19th, century American poet Walter Whitman. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What would you like to have said that you didn't say? Well, I think in relation to the last discussion, I think it's so fascinating that a classificatory system that was devised before really anything of the theory of evolution was known is still being used in the era of evolutionary biology.

And that must speak to the power of the system, mustn't it? the power of the taxonomical system. Yes, I think that's true. I mean, it's, yes, that's true. The thing was interesting about evolution is that something like 70% of the world population deny its truth, okay? Creationism is a much more widespread idea than evolutionism.

Even in civilized countries like the United States, there are tens of millions of creationists. But nobody really doesn't. believe in taxonomy, because you only have to look. It's obvious that a bird and a bee are not the same thing. So that doesn't engender too much controversy, whereas evolution does, because somehow I never understand why it engenders it. Because you can't see it happening in a static and clear way.

Evolution is a mess. It's absolutely a complete shambles and process of evolution. And that makes people uneasy. And that's why evolution is politically controversial. and taxonomy isn't. Yeah. I think an additional aspect of that topic is that actually the linear hierarchy conceptualizes diversity in a way that matches genealogical explanations.

And that's also how Darwin motivates his theory. He says it provides a perfect explanation for the taxonomic distribution that we observe, this forming boxes within boxes. That's that's not something that necessarily should be the case. And what is interesting is that Linnaeus himself during his career increasingly is unsettled by the idea of diversity. He increasingly realizes that diversity does not form a rational pattern. In his last academic speech, he starts off by wondering,

why did God not create the world as one big cheese inhabited by one species of maggots? That would be a perfectly rational way. World. Why is there all this diversity? It becomes a problem for him. He starts out with basically one genus, of flies with a couple of species. At the end of his career, there are more than thousands

of a thousand different species of that genus. So it has to be divided up. There are many, many different kinds of flies, which becomes a problem for him, a practical problem, but also a natural philosophical and theological problem. You brought theology in there. Did theology play a big part in his makeup? He was certainly a believer. He was certainly a believer, He was a devout Christian, but like with everything he does, he is idiosyncratic in his religious beliefs. He gets into big trouble with theological colleagues at his university for his theory of creation. But he is someone who believes in creation, obviously, and one of the more interesting things he says about himself and his work is that in the introduction to later

additions of the system manatura is that he's watching God God's back and so God is creating and Linnaeus is watching him from his back so he has

interesting ideas theological ideas yeah I mean Newton too was absolutely obsessed with theology he wrote far far more about theology than he did about physics trying to read some of it. It's completely impenetrable. But somebody asked him whether the gravity system of the planets

was proof of God's theology. And they said, why did the planets start moving? And he said he didn't need a theological explanation of the physics of the planets, but he needed one of what had spun them into action. So what he said was that actually God had put up his finger, pushed the outermost planets, and it started spinning. So there was some theology even there. And, you know, I mean,

it shows the problems of scientists getting involved in philosophy, theology being some set of philosophy. You know, it's obviously seen to me that philosophy is to science, pornography as to sex, you know, right? You're describing it. you're not actually explaining it. So that all the philosophical stuff does very little to explain what's happening in the universe.

And I don't know a single modern scientist who's in the slightest but interested in the philosophy of science. There is a, you know, most of my students have never heard of the philosophy of science, but that doesn't stop many of them becoming good scientists. So I think it shows that there's an objectivity in science and you don't need any kind of philosophy to understand it. I find this a bit controversial as a very,

philosopher and also someone who has studied the relationship between philosophy and botany, for example. So if we go back to that question raised earlier about the history of the discovery of the sex of plants, it would not have happened. Did those scientists, as we now call them, they didn't call themselves that then, they called themselves philosophers, it would not have happened. Did they not have a belief, an Aristotelian belief, that there must be male and female in plants because male and female were the principles of life. So in that case, their philosophical commitments were the condition of possibility of the scientific discoveries that they made.

Yeah, or even some of them were probably anti- Aristotelian in the sense that they said animals and plants. They seem to be higher and lower, but actually they enjoy the same kind of life. Plants as well sense. Plants as well move. they have sex actually just like animals yeah that was

but but but these were at the time philosophical questions and what kind of life a plant enjoys is still a philosophical question it's not a scientific question author from the producer would have a cup of tea yeah

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