Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life
Jason Roberts
Random House
Copyright 2024 by the author

The Scientific Revolution kept rolling on. The Copernican Revolution changed how we look at the universe. Isaac Newton crystallized several lines of inquiry into modern physics. Now it was time to tackle the life sciences.

Two geniuses would set things in motion by taking on the huge task of organizing and classifying living things. In Sweden, Carl Linnaeus was set on becoming a doctor, but he found the field of botany more fascinating. In France, Georges-Louis Leclerc, the self-styled Comte de Buffon, used a lucky inheritance to indulge his passion for “natural history”. A brief work in statistics (“Buffon’s Needle”) got him noticed, and soon he was picked to be the “superintendent” of the Royal Garden* in Paris, where he was given the task of cataloging the massive collections.

Roberts treats these two contemporaries with a dual biography, showing how they approached the matter of the abundance and variety of life from two different directions.

It’s very good as a biography (or biographies), but it’s hard to avoid that Roberts seems to be playing favorites. Buffon gets credited (as he should be) for laying the groundwork for evolutionary theory, but Linnaeus gets dissed for being overly concerned with classifications – and for one minor half-baked idea of his that, although in keeping with some of the theories of his time, got used as the starting point for racism.

Linnaeus noted that humans came in four major colors, depending on their area of origin: White from Europe, Yellow from Asia, Red from the Americas, and Black from Africa. He assigned each of them a personality type. That can be seen as being racist, depending on how you translate his terms. But it is fully in line with the “Four Humors” theory of medicine and health, which goes back to Aristotle’s four elements – earth, air, fire, water. Those got connected to four “qualities” – hot, cold, wet, dry – and then to four bodily “fluids” – “phlegm” (any white or whitish fluid – mucus, pus, semen, etc.), blood, yellow bile, black bile. An excess of one of those caused a distinct personality type to appear – phlegmatic, sanguine, choleric, melancholic. Linnaeus’ simply tried to connect the skin tone to the fluid, and then their corresponding personality type. It is, of course, bullcrap, but it’s one of those things that make sense when you’re lying in bed halfway between sleep and full wakefulness. Linnaeus, to his credit, did NOT state that it meant that one skin color was somehow “better” than another.

Roberts seems to think it was UNFAIR!!! that almost immediately after Linnaeus’ death, societies named in his honor sprung up to continue his work of classification, while Buffon’s grave was desecrated and his work at the Royal Gardens was almost destroyed in the French Revolution. But a lot of things got caught up in the madness of the Revolution (the ghost of Antoine Lavoisier enters the chat), and the Linnaean method of classification has become the archetype. That the definitions and identities of species have changed over the decades, and his system has been modified to account for new findings, doesn’t mean it’s invalid**. For one thing, it’s not easy to talk about how species evolve and new ones arise if you’ve got no way of determining what a species is. And it should be pointed out (because I don’t think Roberts does) that in his classifications, Linnaeus treated humans as just another animal, giving them their own species name. This was radical for the time, and I believe it actually was the first time anyone seriously looked at humans as a part of the animal kingdom.

The subtitle was almost certainly added buy the publisher to boost sales. There’s nothing to indicate that there was a “race” involved, or that Linnaeus and Buffon were even rivals. Their disagreements were more the sort of philosophical differences that come up when you are blazing a trail into an entirely new field. And the “deadly” nature was simply due to the risks of sending people off to the farthest reaches of the globe to collect new specimens. It was pure chance that so many of their “acolytes” came to their deaths on their journeys.

On the other hand, I should note with delight the cover illustration, which includes drawings of many of the creatures – both real and imagined – that drove the “natural historians” of the era nuts. It’s a veritable Cabinet of Curiosities.

If Linnaeus had a Tragic Flaw, it was that he was so focused on classification and identification that he wasn’t able to see any connections between species. He was too busy counting and categorizing trees to get a sense of the whole forest. Similarly, one could say that Buffon spent far too much time getting into the details on everything – not just animals (nine volumes on birds alone!) and plants, but minerals and the history of the Earth – to be able to devote serious thought to what the consequences of his work would be***.

“[Buffon] was not an evolutionary biologist, yet he was the father of evolutionism. He was the first person to discuss a large number of evolutionary problems, problems that before Buffon had not been raised by anybody … he brought them to the attention of the scientific world.” – Ernst Mayer

Even with the few minor flaws, this is a really insightful and wonderful paired biography. To those already reasonably familiar with the subject, it doesn’t really shed much in the way of new light on Buffon or Linnaeus. But it’s written well enough and with an easy style that it will hopefully bring this era in the History of Science to the public attention that it deserves. And if more people come to appreciate the wonderful diversity of the natural world, all the better.

* I’m using a translation of its actual name – “Jardin du Roi”

** We haven’t tossed Newtonian Mechanics into the trash just because General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics were developed to deal with some weird special cases.

*** It didn’t help that the Theology Department at the Sorbonne University had final say over any scientific publication; things could not be seen to directly challenge the Biblical narrative. This wasn’t as bad as it seems; Buffon – like other authors, probably – simply added a modest disclaimer (“Of course, this is all speculation and should not be considered as a serious contradiction of Scripture” or words to that effect) and he was good to go. But it’s still an annoyance and could not have helped.