Happy birthday, Linnaeus: the great biological classifier celebrates his 300th birthday in 2007, while Buffon, born the same year and Linnaeus's greatest rival, has been forgotten. Are we celebrating the wrong birthday?

Natural History, Dec, 2006 by Richard Conniff

Come and stand here," said a guide in a room on the second floor of the house where the naturalist Carl Linnaeus lived with his wife, five children, several monkeys, parrots, and a pet raccoon. The house, in Uppsala, Sweden, is now the Linnaeus Museum. "Do you feel the way the floor is worn away under your feet?"

Linnaeus stood on this spot to lecture his students, in a corner of the room where the professorial elbow naturally eases back onto the carved mantle. By all accounts, he was a charismatic teacher, both ribald and full of religious fervor for the wonders of the natural world. The words Linnaeus spoke here inspired nineteen of his students to undertake voyages of exploration to the far corners of the Earth. He called them his "apostles," praised their every "immortal" discovery, and saw half of them die overseas in the service of his mission. His ideas would also prove indispensable to later explorers, from Captain James Cook and Charles Darwin to biologists of the present day.

Linnaeus was, of course, the inventor of the system by which every living species gets its two-part scientific name, its genus and its species. Homo sapiens, for instance, was a name Linnaeus coined. People today tend to take his system for granted, and scientific names such as E. coli and C. elegans have become part of the common language. Of Linnaeus himself, even biologists specializing in natural history generally know little or nothing.

But for those who had struggled to make sense of the world before Linnaeus, the system he invented was cause for jubilation. "When Linnaeus started," says Thierry Hoquet, a science historian at the University of Paris X-Nanterre, "natural history was a mess, and people needed guidelines. Do you know in Greek mythology the story of how Ariadne fell in love with Theseus, and gave him a ball of thread to help him find his way out of the Minotaur's Labyrinth? Linnaeus gave us the thread."

Having followed that thread myself, I wanted to know more about Linnaeus. A good way to do it, it seemed to me, was to look not just at Linnaeus, but also at his underappreciated French rival, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, whose encyclopedic Histoire naturelle became one of the best sellers of the eighteenth century. Both men were born in 1707, and so both are rapidly approaching their 300th birthdays. And both struggled with the same fundamental questions, which still trouble biologists today: What exactly is a species? Where does one species end and another begin? How do species and habitats affect each other?

Both Linnaeus and Buffon were towering figures in their day, and each despised the other. Linnaeus regarded himself as anointed by God to bring order to the chaos of creation. Buffon, who was in many ways the deeper thinker, questioned the very idea of creation and provided crucial scientific evidence against Biblical assumptions about the age of the Earth. Linnaeus focused his relentless energy on naming species and organizing them into groups. Buffon ridiculed the whole idea of imposing order on nature, preferring instead to focus on how species behaved and how they related to one another.

And yet with the questions they asked, Linnaeus and Buffon together launched one of the greatest intellectual quests in history--to understand life on Earth in all its diversity. In place of the animal folklore that earlier naturalists had complacently repeated since Roman times, they demanded specimens and eyewitness accounts. When they began their work, the number of species known to science was no more than a few thousand. Today, it numbers about 1.7 million. Linnaeus will get much of the credit for that, in tercentennial events around the world in the coming year. But as I learned about Buffon, whose own tercentennial will be largely ignored, I began to wonder: could it be that we're celebrating the wrong birthday?

The known world at the start of the eighteenth century did not include Antarctica, nor much more than a glimpse of the coast of Australia. But every ship coming home from Africa, Asia, and the Americas seemed to carry some bizarre new creature: an opossum appeared on the crowded London quays, an iguana in Antwerp, a chambered nautilus shell in Paris. How did such creatures live? Where did they fit in the scheme of creation? How did they affect ideas about our own species? Naturalists caught in the tide of strange new life-forms had no language or methodology for discussing such questions. They could not agree on how to name the plants and animals in their own backyards. How could they possibly make sense of species at the opposite ends of the Earth?

Linnaeus was hardly an obvious candidate to provide the answer. He was a provincial, descended from four generations of Lutheran parsons in the Swedish countryside. But he was a careful observer of plants and animals, and compulsively organized about recording his observations. He was also ambitious and spectacularly egotistical ("Nobody has been a greater botanist or zoologist," he once wrote). By the age of twenty-five he had already completed an expedition to Lapland, sponsored by the Royal Society of Science in Uppsala. He later depicted his journey as a perilous adventure among dangerous natives in uncharted regions. But in her 1999 biography, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation, the historian Lisbet Koerner of Imperial College London concludes that he probably spent no more than a few weeks among the Sami people there. He also claimed double the distance he actually traveled, possibly because he was being paid by the mile.