NAMING NATURE

New York Times “Science Times” writer Yoon debuts with a wondrous history of taxonomy—the science of ordering and naming living things—and how it has disconnected us from the natural world.

As she lucidly describes how different cultures have named plants and animals through history, the author uncovers the sharp disjuncture between folk taxonomy—the similar, appearance-based ways in which ordinary people have always named living things—and the science of classification, which has dominated our thinking about nature since Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist and author of Systema Naturae (1735), set the rule that every species must have a two-part name, or Latin binomial. Yoon traces the rise of various schools of scientific taxonomy—evolutionary, numerical and molecular—each of which emphasizes different factors of classifying living things. She also examines the work of leading figures in the field, from the German ornithologist Ernst Mayr to Austrian biologist Robert Sokal, and describes the near-rabid infighting over methodology. Against all of this she posits the power of the human umwelt (a German word for the environment or “surrounding world”), a hard-wired way of perceiving the living world that has allowed humans since the ancient hunter-gatherers to recognize things and survive. The umwelt, writes the author, accounts for the fact that different cultures give similar names, such as fish, to wildlife—and has long served as humanity’s most intimate connection to the natural world. By bowing to the rationality of a scientific view of the natural order, we have undermined our understanding of the world. Yoon’s accounts of brain-damaged individuals who cannot recognize and name living things—and of young children’s unquenchable interest, even before they can walk or talk, in the natural world—bring to life the marvel of our intuitive umwelt abilities. We must cling to these abilities if we are to preserve nature, the author argues. Brightly blending scientific expertise with personal experience, Yoon is an outstanding science writer who takes a seemingly dull topic and rivets unsuspecting readers to the page.

Superb.