[HN Gopher] 'The Man Who Organized Nature': Linnaeus ___________________________________________________________________ 'The Man Who Organized Nature': Linnaeus Author : andrewl Score : 25 points Date : 2023-07-17 11:19 UTC (11 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.wsj.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com) | NoboruWataya wrote: | I actually first heard about Linnaeus when reading up on the Tafl | family of board games[0]. These are a number of related board | games that were played primarily in Viking and Celtic societies. | The games pre-date chess and were ultimately replaced by it as | the board game of choice in those societies. Very little is known | about the actual rules observed by players at the time. The most | complete account we have is a journal written by Linnaeus in | 1732, when he observed a variant being played by the Sami people | in northern Scandinavia. | | 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafl_games | FollowingTheDao wrote: | To organize nature is to destroy nature. | bouvin wrote: | Melvyn Bragg and his guests recently covered Linnaeus on In Our | Time [1]. | | [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001l291 | timruffles wrote: | If you live in or near London, go for a (free) tour of the | Linnean Society. Worth it to see his beautiful notebooks alone. | Also learned that he included phoenixes in his original taxonomy! | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animalia_Paradoxa | dmaa wrote: | Whenever I see Linnaeus, I am accorded to this study of latinised | surnames in modern Sweden and how they can be used to 'measure' | social mobility: | | https://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/Swede... | archo wrote: | https://archive.is/FHE5L | adrian_b wrote: | The title of the biographic book, "The Man Who Organized Nature", | is very appropriate for Linnaeus, whose contribution to the | development of biology and mineralogy is the most important after | those of Aristotle and Theophrastus. | | Nevertheless "Linnaeus the Namer", which is used by WSJ, is very | poorly chosen as an expression for showing respect to him. | | The reason is that even if Linnaeus has coined thousands of names | for identifying precisely the species of living beings, this was | by far the worst part of his work, because many of those names | were based on confusions and mistakes. | | Unfortunately, we are stuck with the wrong names given by | Linnaeus, because the rules for priority of the older names in | biological nomenclature go only back down to Linnaeus in 1758, so | even when many other authors have used better names before 1758, | they do not have priority, while the better names used by other | authors after Linnaeus have been discarded, because Linnaeus was | earlier. So according to the rules, the names chosen by Linnaeus | have priority both against earlier and against later authors. | | Most of the wrong names given by Linnaeus are Greek. It seems | that he had poor knowledge of ancient Greek, so when he took a | lot of names from Aristotle and Theophrastus, he made a lot of | confusions exchanging many names between themselves. | | As just a pair of examples of the very many mistakes, Linnaeus | named the capricorn beetle as "Cerambyx", but in Greek "Cerambyx" | was the name of the stag beetle, and he also named a species of | true shrimps as "crangon", while in Greek "crangon" was the name | of the mantis shrimp. Even if in English the mantis shrimp has | "shrimp" in its name, it is only extremely distantly related to | the true shrimps. Their ancestors had already separated at a time | when e.g. the ancestors of humans and snakes were still | identical. | | Among the names of plants, the most obvious mistakes were that he | applied many ancient Greek names to plants brought from America, | so, for the plants which originally had those names, different | new names had to be coined. For instance, Linnaeus named the | maize as "Zea", but in Greek "Zea" was the name for emmer wheat. | | Linnaeus has done a huge amount of work, so it is understandable | that he was sometimes lazy and he did not stop to read carefully | the old works to see the meaning of the words used there. | Therefore his many mistakes are easily forgiven. | | The only problem is that it was not accepted early enough that | such mistakes should be corrected instead of being followed | blindly. Now, after the words chosen by Linnaeus have been used | with the new altered meaning for more than 200 years, it has | become impossible to ever change them. | | Nowadays this remains a problem only for whoever reads books that | are older than 1758, because there one may encounter names that | are now familiar with the meaning given by Linnaeus, but which | then had a different meaning. | | The worst appears in some commentaries about Ancient Greek texts, | when the modern authors encounter some of the scientific names | used today and they mistakenly believe that the words have the | modern meaning and they present various arguments based on such | wrong premises, which lead to ridiculous conclusions. | Agentlien wrote: | Another interesting mistake is Capsicum annuum, the most common | species of chilli peppers. The name indicates that it's annual, | but it is actually perennial. | | Carl von Linne first came across it in the Swedish province | Scania where it was cultivated by monks but couldn't survive | the cold winters. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-07-17 23:00 UTC)