VOCABULARY ISN'T SCIENCE:

Carl Linnaeu: The man who named the natural world: His system of scientific names still shapes the way we think about the natural world. And today, 300 years after his birth, Carl Linnaeus matters more than ever (Michael McCarthy, 23 May 2007, Independent)

Happy anniversary: the man who gave us the key to the natural world was born 300 years ago today. Carl Linnaeus, who created the system of scientific names that we still use for all living things, began life in a turf-roofed farmstead in southern Sweden on 23 May, 1707. [...]

Take the emblematic bird of the Tower of London, for instance. The raven: Corvus corax. Unnecessary, you might think, a waste of time. Why not just call it a raven and have done with it? Until you remember that in France, a raven is a grand corbeau. In the Netherlands, it's a raaf. In Germany, it's a kolkrabe, while in Linnaeus's own Sweden it's a korp, never mind what it's called as you travel across Eurasia through Finland and Russia to Japan and Korea and China. Yet a biologist from any one of them can talk about a raven to a biologist from any other, and know they are referring to the same organism, because they both accept that this member of the crow family, for which they each have a different common name, is also universally known, scientifically, as Corvus corax, the name that Carl Linnaeus bestowed upon it two-and-a-half centuries ago.

Just how important this is starts to dawn on you when you realise how great is the variety of life on Earth. There are about 10,000 bird species in the world, and about half that number of mammals. There are more than 400,000 species of plants that have so far been described, and much more than a million species of insects, with perhaps another two to three million still to be discovered.

Any sufficiently precise system of classification is indistinguishable from magic.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 23, 2007 12:00 AM