Posts Tagged ‘Linnaeus’
“Alchemy. The link between the immemorial magic arts and modern science. Humankind’s first systematic effort to unlock the secrets of matter by reproducible experiment.”*…
As (AI/tech pro and writer) Dale Markowitz explains, for scientists of yore anything—from mermaids to alchemy—was on the table…
In 1936, the economist John Maynard Keynes purchased a trove of Isaac Newton’s unpublished notes. These included more than 100,000 words on the great physicist’s secret alchemical experiments. Keynes, shocked and awed, dubbed them “wholly magical and wholly devoid of scientific value.” This unexpected discovery, paired with things like Newton’s obsession with searching for encrypted messages in the Bible’s Book of David, showed that Newton “was not the first of the age of reason,” Keynes concluded. “He was the last of the magicians.”
When it came to fascination with the occult, Newton was hardly alone. Many contemporary scientists may cast aspersions on spells, mythical tales, and powers of divination. Not so for many of the early modern thinkers who laid the foundations of modern science. To them, the world teemed with the uncanny: witches, unicorns, mermaids, stars that foretold the future, base metals that could be coaxed into gold or distilled into elixirs of eternal life.
These fantastical beliefs were shared by the illiterate and educated elite alike—including many of the forebears of contemporary science, including chemist Robert Boyle, who gave us modern chemistry and Boyle’s law, and biologist Carl Linnaeus, who developed the taxonomic system by which scientists classify species today. Rather than stifling discovery, their now-arcane beliefs may have helped drive them and other scientists to endure hot smoky days in the bowels of alchemical laboratories or long frigid nights on the balconies of astronomical towers.
To understand the role of magic in spurring scientific progress, it helps to understand the state of learning in Europe in those times. Throughout the Middle Ages, many scholars were fixated on the idea that knowledge could only be gleaned from ancient texts. Universities taught from incomplete, often poorly translated copies of Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Galen. To stray from the giants was a crime: In 14th-century Oxford, scholars could be charged 5 shillings for contradicting Aristotle. Curiosity was considered a sin on par with lust. A powerful motivator was needed to shuck off ancient thinking.
One of the first influential thinkers to break with the old ways was the 16th-century Swiss-German physician Paracelsus. The father of toxicology, known for his pioneering use of chemicals in medicine, Paracelsus was among the first of his time to champion the importance of experimentation and observation—a philosophy which would set the foundations for the scientific method. Paracelsus showed the scholars what he thought of their old books by publicly burning his copies of Galen and Avicenna.
But what led him to this experiment-first approach? Perhaps it was because, to Paracelsus, experimentation was a kind of magic. His writing fuses scientific observation with the occult. To him, medicine, astrology, and alchemy were inextricably linked—different ways of unveiling sacred truths hidden in nature by God. Paracelsus considered himself a kind of magus, as he believed Moses and Solomon had been, as Newton would view himself 150 years later. Paracelsus believed, though, that divine knowledge could be gained not just by studying scripture, but also by studying nature. The alchemical workbench, the night sky—these were even surer routes to God than any dusty old textbook…
[Markowitz recounts the stories of Tycho Brahe [almanac entry here], his patron Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, Robert Boyle, William Harvey, and Linnaeus [here], who, in 1749, urged the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to launch a hunt for mermaids…]
… To our contemporary ears, most all of this may sound fairly ridiculous. But as Edward Donlick puts it in The Clockwork Universe, “The world was so full of marvels, in other words, that the truly scientific approach was to reserve judgment about what was possible and what wasn’t, and to observe and experiment instead.” To the 17th-century scientist, anything was on the table, so long as it could be experimentally studied.
Today, we know how the story ends: Belief in astrology, alchemy, and witchcraft declined in places where empiricism and skepticism became cornerstones of science. But perhaps early scientists’ fascination with the occult should remind us of other tenants of discovery: open-mindedness and curiosity. Witches, mermaids, and the philosopher’s stone may not have survived modern scrutiny, but it was curiosity about them that drove real progress and allowed early thinkers to stray from established norms. In this sense, curiosity is a kind of magic…
“How the Occult Gave Birth to Science,” from @dalequark.bsky.social in @nautil.us.
See also: “The importance of experimental proof, on the other hand, does not mean that without new experimental data we cannot make advances” and “Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher’s stone. That was the pebble by the seashore he really wanted to find.”
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As we think about transmutation, we might spare a thought for a rough contemporary (and fellow-traveler) of Newton’s, Rasmus Bartholin; he died on this date in 1698. A physician, mathematician, and physicist, he is best known for his discovery of the optical phenomenon of double refraction. In 1669, Bartholin observed that images seen through Icelandic feldspar (calcite) were doubled and that, when the crystal was rotated, one image remained stationary while the other rotated with the crystal. Such behaviour of light could not be explained using Newton’s optical theories of the time. Subsequently, this was explained as the effect of the polarisation of the light.
Bartholin also wrote a several mathematical works and made astronomical observations (including the comets of 1665). And he is famed for his medical work, in particular his introduction of quinine in the fight against malaria.
(Bartholin’s family was packed with pioneering scientists, 12 of whom became professors at the University of Copenhagen; perhaps most notable, his elder brother Thomas, who discovered the lymphatic system in humans and advanced the theory of “refrigeration anesthesia”(being the first to describe it scientifically).
“An understanding of the natural world, and what’s in it is a source of not only great curiosity but great fulfillment”*…
Ah yes, but in what does that understanding consist? John Long considers the competing frameworks of Linnaeus and Buffon…
The modern science biography must hold back no punches in its mission to represent the subject’s life, equally celebrating their great works while including their personal shortcomings.
Jürgen Neffe’s Einstein: A Biography (2005) and Dava Sobel’s The Elements of Marie Curie (2024) are wonderful examples of this style. Such books succeed in clearly explaining the complex science of their subject’s work for non-scientific readers, enabling a deep appreciation of their achievements and bringing them to life as rounded, flawed humans.
The modern science biography must hold back no punches in its mission to represent the subject’s life, equally celebrating their great works while including their personal shortcomings.
Jürgen Neffe’s Einstein: A Biography (2005) and Dava Sobel’s The Elements of Marie Curie (2024) are wonderful examples of this style. Such books succeed in clearly explaining the complex science of their subject’s work for non-scientific readers, enabling a deep appreciation of their achievements and bringing them to life as rounded, flawed humans.
Jason Roberts’ Every Living Thing – The Great and Deadly Race to Know all Life is another of these rare works. This engrossing, precisely researched book focuses on two central characters born in the same year: Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), a Swede, and Frenchman Georges-Louis LeClerc, the Compte de Buffon (1707-1788), better known as just Buffon.
Roberts’ book won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for biography. His writing pulls the reader effortlessly through the story, revealing delightful, unexpected twists and turns in the two men’s complex and disparate lives. Each worked diligently to reach a level of global notoriety for their many published books. Both are revered in the natural history world today.
Linnaeus, a biologist and physician, is known for his system of hierarchical classification: how all living things comprise a genus and species, (we humans are Homo sapiens), which fit into families, orders, classes and so on. (A good many intermediate ranks were added later). While his work has been hugely influential, Linnaeus is portrayed by Roberts at times as being lazy, vain and unethical.
Linnaeus was primarily driven to be the first to name new species. Buffon was working on a grand thesis of how all life’s organisms function and are related to one another. A wealthy count who inherited a vast fortune at the age of ten, Buffon trained as a lawyer but became fascinated by the trees that grew in his large garden.
Buffon is best known today for his extensive books on natural history and works on mathematics and cosmology. He calculated the Earth was much older than the Bible predicted and that life sprung from unorganised matter. He explored the relationships between organisms rather than how they were classified. His core work formed the basis for modern evolutionary theory.
Why was all this important? At the time, the task of classifying plants was vital to the growing economies of nations. Travellers to the far reaches of the globe brought back examples of economically valuable new species, like plant foods, medicinal plants or beautiful ornamental specimens.
The author’s central thesis is Linnaeus was not as brilliant as history paints him and Buffon was a far greater genius for his day.
Where does genius come from, Roberts asks? Is it inherent by birth, grown from an inspiring education, or is it something within that is nurtured by passion?
Both these brilliant men who made a lasting mark on science came from not very inspiring families. Nor did they excel at school or university. This story shows success in academic work is not just about intellect, but intimately tied to the ethics and morality of doing research…
Eminently worth reading in full: “How do we understand life on Earth? A prize-winning biography charts the tension between two types of science ‘genius’” from @theconversation.com.
* David Attenborough, who also observed, “We moved from being a part of nature to being apart from nature.”
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As we noodle on knowing, we might send birthday greetings to Gregor Mendel; he was born on this date in 1822 (though some sources give the date as July 20). A botanist, geneticist, and monk, he pioneered in the study of heredity.
Mendel spent his adult life with the Augustinian monastery in Brunn, where as a plant experimenter, he was the first to lay the mathematical foundation of the science of genetics, in what came to be called Mendelism. Over the period 1856-63, Mendel grew and analyzed over 28,000 pea plants. He carefully studied for each their plant height, pod shape, pod color, flower position, seed color, seed shape and flower color. He made two very important generalizations from his pea experiments, known today as the Laws of Heredity, and coined the genetic terms recessiveness and dominance. He read a paper on his studies in 1865 to the Brünn Society for Natural Sciences in Moravia– but it lay unappreciated until 1900.
“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance – it is the illusion of knowledge”*…
Learning from the past: as John Thornhill explains in his consideration of Jason Roberts‘ Every Living Thing, the rivalry between Buffon and Linnaeus has lessons about disrupters and exploitation…
The aristocratic French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon chose a good year to die: 1788. Reflecting his status as a star of the Enlightenment and author of 35 popular volumes on natural history, Buffon’s funeral carriage drawn by 14 horses was watched by an estimated 20,000 mourners as it processed through Paris. A grateful Louis XVI had earlier erected a statue of a heroic Buffon in the Jardin du Roi, over which the naturalist had masterfully presided. “All nature bows to his genius,” the inscription read.
The next year the French Revolution erupted. As a symbol of the ancien regime, Buffon was denounced as an enemy of progress, his estates in Burgundy seized, and his son, known as the Buffonet, guillotined. In further insult to his memory, zealous revolutionaries marched through the king’s gardens (nowadays known as the Jardin des Plantes) with a bust of Buffon’s great rival, Carl Linnaeus. They hailed the Swedish scientific revolutionary as a true man of the people.
The intense intellectual rivalry between Buffon and Linnaeus, which still resonates today, is fascinatingly told by the author Jason Roberts in his book Every Living Thing, my holiday reading while staying near Buffon’s birthplace in Burgundy. Natural history, like all history, might be written by the victors, as Roberts argues. And for a long time, Linnaeus’s highly influential, but flawed, views held sway. But the book makes a sympathetic case for the further rehabilitation of the much-maligned Buffon.
The two men were, as Roberts writes, exact contemporaries and polar opposites. While Linnaeus obsessed about classifying all biological species into neat categories with fixed attributes and Latin names (Homo sapiens, for example), Buffon emphasised the vast diversity and constantly changing nature of every living thing.
In Roberts’s telling, Linnaeus emerges as a brilliant but ruthless dogmatist, who ignored inconvenient facts that did not fit his theories and gave birth to racial pseudoscience. But it was Buffon’s painstaking investigations and acceptance of complexity that helped inspire the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin, who later acknowledged that the Frenchman’s ideas were “laughably like mine”.
In two aspects, at least, this 18th-century scientific clash rhymes with our times. The first is to show how intellectual knowledge can often be a source of financial gain. The discovery of crops and commodities in other parts of the world and the development of new methods of cultivation had a huge impact on the economy in that era. “All that is useful to man originates from these natural objects,” Linnaeus wrote. “In one word, it is the foundation of every industry.”
Great wealth was generated from trade in sugar, potatoes, coffee, tea and cochineal while Linnaeus himself explored ways of cultivating pineapples, strawberries and freshwater pearls.
“In many ways, the discipline of natural history in the 18th century was roughly analogous to technology today: a means of disrupting old markets, creating new ones, and generating fortunes in the process,” Roberts writes. As a former software engineer at Apple and a West Coast resident, Roberts knows the tech industry.
Then as now, the addition of fresh inputs into the economy — whether natural commodities back then or digital data today — can lead to astonishing progress, benefiting millions. But it can also lead to exploitation. As Roberts tells me in a telephone interview, it was the scaling up of the sugar industry in the West Indies that led to the slave trade. “Sometimes we think we are inventing the future when we are retrofitting the past,” he says.
The second resonance with today is the danger of believing we know more than we do. Roberts compares Buffon’s state of “curious unknowing” to the concept of “negative capability” described by the English poet John Keats. In a letter written in 1817, Keats argued that we should resist the temptation to explain away things we do not properly understand and accept “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
Armed today with instant access to information and smart machines, the temptation is to ascribe a rational order to everything, as Linnaeus did. But scientific progress depends on a humble acceptance of relative ignorance and a relentless study of the fabric of reality. The spooky nature of quantum mechanics would have blown Linnaeus’s mind. If Buffon still teaches us anything, it is to study the peculiarity of things as they are, not as we might wish them to be…
“What an epic 18th-century scientific row teaches us today,” @johnthornhillft on @itsJason in @FT (gift link)
Pair with “Frameworks” from Céline Henne (@celinehenne) “Knowledge is often a matter of discovery. But when the nature of an enquiry itself is at question, it is an act of creation.”
* Daniel J. Boorstin
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As we embrace the exceptions, we might send carefully-coded birthday greetings to John McCarthy; he was born on this date in 1927. An eminent computer and cognitive scientist– he was awarded both the Turning Prize and the National Medal of Science– McCarthy coined the phrase “artificial Intelligence” to describe the field of which he was a founder.
It was McCarthy’s 1979 article, “Ascribing Mental Qualities to Machines” (in which he wrote, “Machines as simple as thermostats can be said to have beliefs, and having beliefs seems to be a characteristic of most machines capable of problem solving performance”) that provoked John Searle‘s 1980 disagreement in the form of his famous Chinese Room Argument… provoking a broad debate that continues to this day.
“Am I as admirable as that ant?”*…
There are lots of ants on earth. And, as Anna Turns explains, they play a big role as ecosystem engineers– as well as providing insights on everything from the climate to aging…
To most of us, they are small, uninteresting and sometimes annoying, but 2022 revealed just how ubiquitous ants are and how indispensable they are to the planet. Scientists revealed in September that there are an estimated 20 quadrillion (or 20 million billion) ants globally – that’s 2.5 million for every person on the planet.
More than 12,000 known species of ant live in all sorts of habitats, from the Arctic to the tropics and they represent one of the most diverse, abundant and specialist groups of animals on the planet. Leafcutter ants are fungus farmers, slave-making ants capture broods to increase their work force, while wood ants herd aphids to the juiciest parts of a plant to harvest their honeydew sap…
Experts agree that ants are ecosystem engineers because they play a crucial role in decomposing organic matter, recycling nutrients, improving soil health, removing pests and dispersing seeds. But, historically, ants haven’t attracted as much attention as crop pollinators, such as bees, which perhaps have more of an obvious economic value. That bias could soon change. Ants have been used as a biological pest control on citrus crops in China for centuries, and research published in August indicates that the pest control potential of some predatory ants could work better than some agricultural chemicals.
The wonders of ant biology throw up plenty of other possibilities for real-world applications. Queen ants that live more than 30 years – yet have the same genetic material as a short-lived worker ant – could teach us something about senescence. Nobody understands how queens store sperm for decades inside their bodies without any degradation, despite colonies living in different climates. Meanwhile, Schultheiss’ [Dr Patrick Schultheiss, of the University of Würzburg] research into ant navigation – how they find food and how they behave when they get lost – could help build mathematical models that instruct a robot searching for missing people.
Looking back at how ants evolved can shed light on a huge array of other plants and animals, too. Butterflies that rely on ants to tend to their caterpillars could disappear if those ants are wiped out, says Corrie Moreau, a professor at Cornell University: “Nature is this intricate woven tapestry and if you pull one thread, you’ll never know which is the critical thread that makes the whole thing fall apart.”…
“Insects and us: a mind-blowing 20 quadrillion ants and what they mean for the planet,” from @AnnaTurns in @guardian.
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As we get antsy, we might spare a thought for Swedish botanist Carl Linné, better known as Carolus Linnaeus, “the Father of Taxonomy,” died on this date in 1778. Historians suggest that the academically-challenged among us can take heart from his story: at the University of Lund, where he studied medicine, he was “less known for his knowledge of natural history than for his ignorance of everything else.” Still, he made is way from Lund to Uppsala, where he began his famous system of plant and animal classification– still in use today.
“In the end everything is connected”*…
A fungus known as a Dermocybe forms part of the underground wood wide web that stitches together California’s forests [source]
Research has shown that beneath every forest and wood there is a complex underground web of roots, fungi and bacteria helping to connect trees and plants to one another.
This subterranean social network, nearly 500 million years old, has become known as the “wood wide web.”
Now, an international study has produced the first global map of the “mycorrhizal fungi networks” dominating this secretive world…
Mycorrhizal ecologist Dr Merlin Sheldrake, said, “Plants’ relationships with mycorrhizal fungi underpin much of life on land. This study … provides key information about who lives where, and why. This dataset will help researchers scale up from the very small to the very large.”…
The underground network of microbes that connects trees—charted for first time: “Wood Wide Web: trees’ social networks are mapped.”
Read the Nature release that reports the research here.
* The Book of Chameleons
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As we contemplate connection, we might spare a thought for Anders (Andreas) Dahl; he died on this date in 1789. A botanist and student of Carl Linnaeus, he is the inspiration for, the namesake of, the dahlia flower.
Dahlia, the flower named after Anders Dahl [source]
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