Strong Recommend: Every Living Thing by Jason Roberts

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Welcome to Strong Message Here.

Strong Recommend our cultural recommendations for the summer and a look at their impact on language.

I'm Armandi Nucci.

And I'm Helen Lewis.

And what do you recommend this week, Helen?

I would like to recommend a book called Every Living Thing by Jason Roberts, and it's about taxonomy.

Is it now?

That is...

I know what you're thinking.

I'm thinking...

Brush me details.

Okay, that's about labelling, isn't it?

Exactly.

So it's a twin.

It's a science of labelling.

Yeah, it's a twin biography of Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist, and another guy who we should call the Comte de Buffon, who was, as the name implies, French.

It's about that kind of 18th-century mania for categorising nature,

which I've just found incredibly interesting.

But it's also about how much of the way that we think about the natural world is shaped by Linnaeus.

So he invented, this is his word for you, binomial nomenclature.

And that's

using two words.

Yeah, there we go.

To give a description of

troglodyes is the wren, for example.

So he basically had this idea of nesting all of creation down into different stacking things, you know, species and genus and phylum and whatever it might be.

But he also had some very odd ideas, too.

He believed that God had created the world, and this was, you know, something that you had to write in all the scientific texts at the time.

So he had great difficulty dealing with the fact that there was just a huge amount of variation among species.

There were so many species.

He thought there could only be a limited number because how many names could Noah learn on the ark?

Well, yeah.

I mean, mean, it just makes it makes sense.

And he also thought the fossils weren't real.

I mean, you know, because he was essentially.

Well, he was a creationist, essentially.

So he thought they were just unusual rock formations.

Okay.

Because he couldn't have any idea that there had once been animals like dinosaurs.

If you believe you're a creationist, you can't even use the theory that, you know, in an infinite length of time, sand will form, by coincidence, form the shape of a title.

So what are they then?

So I presume on the eighth or ninth day when God would have done everything else, then he sort of thought, this will be a laugh.

If I'll put some lizards in there

Oh, they'll never guess what these are.

This will keep them guessing for years.

But yeah, so he's contrasts all the way through the author, like Linnaeus' kind of very rigid idea of taxonomy with Duboffon, who had this much more fluid idea.

You know, he was much more of the idea that everything was continuously changing.

He anticipated evolution by natural selection in a lot of ways.

Presumably, the book itself is a rip-roaring read.

Well, it's very nerdy, but I am very nerdy, and therefore I enjoyed it.

And it has, I mean, Linnaeus was mad.

I mean, in the way of Francis Galton, who I wrote about in my book, he was one of these people who was just enormously difficult to get on with, thought an enormous amount of himself, and was very, very weird indeed.

But those biographies are often the most interesting.

It's just, he was a kind of monomaniac.

He tried lots of things.

You know, he tried getting a medical degree, for example, and alighted on this slightly late.

He basically made his name as a kind of Pox doctor and then pivoted hard to botany and became a professor at Uppsala.

One of the things he had was the idea that new species could only be named after botanists, accredited botanists, and people couldn't name the stuff after themselves.

So essentially what happened was that people went, I found this new flower and sent it to him.

And then he said, oh, it's, you know,

whatever, something Ionuchius, right?

But he was absolutely set against the idea that you would ever use native or traditional names for things, which he called barbarous names.

Everything had to be European and Latin.

Yes.

Yes.

So he was very much of his time in the sense of like European civilization was the best.

And presumably presumably then the way they categorized people might now be open to question.

Oh, unbelievably so.

So in Systema Natura, which was his classification system of all of humanity, he essentially came up with the four human races

that I think have infected so much thought ever since.

So he had essentially white Europeans, red Native Americans, tawny Asians and black Africans.

And they were, as you imagine, mostly delineated by skin colour.

But he also had stuff that, you know, Europeans were governed by laws, whereas Africans Africans were governed by whims.

So, he did very much have a hierarchy.

And the thing that's one of the many things that's mad about this is the idea that eventually what they came down to, the idea of species, what a different species is, is that they can't interbreed with each other.

But this doesn't make any sense in the sense that people from Africa and people from Europe can, in fact, have children.

So, he imposed a completely unnecessary racial classification on humans that justified the slave trade, essentially.

And this is a recurring thing.

There are a lot of these classifications, they sound scientific, they have the aura of science, but actually are quite subjective in that they are formed around the overt or covert prejudices of the person doing the classifying.

I mean, we're seeing it at the present day, the way AI, we're told AI is very neutral, and yet day after day, we're hearing stories about how one chat bot has got very racist once they tweak the algorithms and so on.

Yes, Grok declared it was Mecca Hitler

for a brief period, for a brief period.

For a brief period, for brief periods, yeah.

No, you're right.

Francis Golden, who's in in my book, is exactly the same in that he decided to draw up a list of geniuses.

And one of the ways he did that was by looking at the length of obituary you'd got in the Times.

Right.

Which is just not clearly not, when you think about it, not an objective classification.

And the Nazis' system was very much like that.

He kept having to fiddle with it.

He would like, first of all, he decided that ferrets were like badger.

No, the mongoose he thought was a type of ferret, then he thought it was a type of badger.

There was a lot of that kind of stuff.

A lot of this labelling only works as if prior to a lot of people have done an awful lot of work examining the things, the properties of the things about to be labelled.

Well, Duboffin was more in that tradition.

He just would take a horse and he would write down everything about a horse.

Yes.

So he was much more descriptive, I guess, whereas the Linnaean system is much more prescriptive.

I mean, obviously, it's immensely helpful for people in different languages to have a common naming system.

That was the joy of Latin.

And that's sort of held, hasn't it?

Yeah, I just one of my favourite bits is the fact that obviously when they looked at whether or not species can interbreed, did you know people have gone mad at trying to interbreed big cats?

What, with each other?

Yeah, not with the scientists.

Yeah, for clarity.

I don't know how we got to this, but

you can have a jaguleps.

That's a jaguar and a leopard.

A jag lion.

You can probably guess what that is.

A pumapod.

A puma and a panda.

And a leopard.

And a leopard.

Okay, right, good.

Gotcha.

Yeah, second-generation lion tiger hybrids are called Lilliger, Tilliger, Litigan, and Titigan.

Isn't that really joyful?

I mean, it's a very Jurassic park, you know, just because they didn't stop to ask whether or not they should.

It puts the cavapoo in its place, doesn't it?

It really does.

So if you're interested in botany, mad people in the 18th century, or taxonomy, I agree there's maybe three niche interests.

You appear to be at the centre of those three Venn diagrams.

I'm at the nexus of all of them.

But I think it's really interesting in the same way that you might say Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists created our idea of art.

Yes.

You know, he wrote about all those Renaissance artists.

It's to do with who sets the canon.

Yeah, this is the canon.

This is the canon, and therefore you mustn't question it.

Which is, you know, I've gone on at length, wanted to hear about classical music and how.

Is there a book like this for classical music that somebody who sketched out the terrain and who was in and who was out?

Oh, I see.

There's the well, there's the Groves Dictionary, I suppose, that misses out a lot of obscure composers because whoever was compiling it at the time,

Beyond Grove just didn't rate them.

Lots of, obviously, lots of female composers who are just ignored.

My favourite book on classical music is The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross, the New Yorker.

I have that at home, but it's intimidatingly vast.

It's great, though.

And it's very, very chewy, but in an entertaining way, you don't have to have any specialist knowledge.

Well, there we go.

That's what we officially recommend on this product.

Chewy, chewy books.

Chewy knowledge is good, I think.

Yeah.

Chewy knowledge.

Well, thank you very much for that recommendation.

You can find Every Living Thing by Jason Roberts in good bookshops, enterprising bookshops, and I'm sure online bookshops.

And thank you for listening to Strong Message Here, Strong Recommend.

We'll be back next week with a recommendation from me i think until then make sure you're subscribed on bc sounds goodbye goodbye

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