Jason Roberts on 'Every Living Thing': The Great Race to Classify Life

The Core Question: Categorizing Life

• 💡 The central question explored is whether life on Earth fits into tidy, static categories or exists as a dynamic swirl of complexities.
• 🎯 This dichotomy is at the heart of Jason Roberts' book, "Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life."

Carl Linnaeus: The Systematizer

• 🔬 Carl Linnaeus, an 18th-century Swedish doctor and biologist, is credited with creating a system for naming and nesting all life into categories like kingdom, genus, and species.
• ⚠️ Linnaeus's system was built on the concept of a static creation, predating evolutionary theory, and he denied concepts like evolution and extinction.

Georges Louis de Buffon: The Complexist

• 🌍 Georges Louis de Buffon, a French naturalist and director of the Jardin des Plantes, offered a more complex and dynamic view of life.
• 🤝 Buffon was a contemporary and rival of Linnaeus, and despite their shared goal of cataloging life, their approaches and philosophies diverged significantly.
• 🧠 Buffon held remarkably advanced ideas for his time, including speculation on geological time, foreshadowing evolution, and proposing theories akin to DNA.

The Rivalry and Its Legacy

• 🏆 The rivalry between Linnaeus and Buffon was intense, with both dedicating decades to their monumental works, ultimately failing to catalog all life.
• 🗣️ While Linnaeus's systematic approach gained traction during periods of expansion and colonization due to its perceived order, Buffon's more nuanced and inclusive views, which respected indigenous names, were initially overshadowed.
• 📜 Charles Darwin later acknowledged Buffon's significant contributions, stating that Buffon was the first to scientifically treat the concept of evolution, a century before Darwin's own work.

The Author's Perspective

• 📖 Jason Roberts, the author, initially focused on Linnaeus but discovered the depth and prescience of Buffon's work.
• 🤝 Roberts, who has a diverse background including labor and computing, approaches writing from the perspective of a self-curious individual, aiming to guide readers through complex questions about life and its categorization.