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Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science
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Item Description...
Overview
Traces the human drive and cognitive capacity for naming the living world, evaluating the contributions of such figures as Linnaeus and Darwin while exploring the human preference for familiar, rather than scientific, names.
Publishers Description
Biologist and journalist Carol Kaesuk Yoon takes us beyond genus and species to deep cognition, revealing our drive to name life. She tells the strange story of scientists leading people away from the impulse to name the living world, even as they are driven by it.Naming Nature, sure to delight readers who love words and nature, is a rich journey of naming from Linnaeus, whose system turned classification from a hobby to a science, and Darwin, who ended the idea of rigid species definitions, to today's dream of naming all of earth's species and listing them online.Readers will see science's limitations and will feel the urgency of staying connected to the natural world by using familiar, rather than scientific, names. Naming Nature illuminates the reasons why we might care less whether a whale is a fish or a mammal as long as we know its importance in our world. |
Item Specifications...
Pages 352
Dimensions: Length: 9.3" Width: 6.1" Height: 1.4"
Weight: 1.2 lbs.
Binding Hardcover
Release Date Aug 24, 2009
ISBN 0393061973
EAN 9780393061970
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Availability 1 units.
Availability accurate as of May 30, 2012 03:24.
Usually ships within one to two business days from La Vergne, TN.
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 | Acknowledging, and Bypassing, the _Umwelt_ Jan 27, 2010 |
Humans try to identify and organize things. It's a big step to larger understanding, and of course it is essential in biology. Scientifically classifying and naming plants and animals has been invaluable in understanding not just the creatures themselves but how they operate together. The impulse to classify and organize goes far back; kids at play will group crayons, trucks, or rocks in comprehensible categories. It's part of our way of perceiving the world, so basic it is part of our _umwelt_, the way we as organisms take in sensations from around us. _umwelt_ is a term first defined by a German scientist (of course) over a hundred years ago, but it is a word that is being used more as we try to consider, say, the _umwelt_ of our dogs (much more olfactory than ours) or bees (based on ultraviolet light which we cannot see). But our own _umwelt_ must be understood before we really understand about taxonomy, the classifying of biological specimens, because although it has powered our classifications, science is chipping away at the old ways of such taxonomies. These are among the lessons of a fascinating book, _Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science_ (Norton) by Carol Kaesuk Yoon. If you thought taxonomy was necessary but fairly dull, you might have been right once upon a time. "Gatherings of taxonomists," says Yoon, "... had a deserved reputation as being a guaranteed snoozer of dreary fusspots." But now such gatherings are full of fireworks from "flamers," extremists enthusiastic about doing classification in the new way based on newly-appreciated Darwinian and genetic science. For taxonomy, this is something like the change in astronomy from the "obviously" true Earth-centered universe to the counterintuitive Copernican one. Yoon writes with clarity and humor, and obvious excitement about the changes in taxonomy, so that even those of us who don't work in the biological sciences can feel the importance of those changes.
Yoon herself has PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology, and she was raised by two working scientists, and she married a scientist, so it isn't surprising that she started out thinking that science was not only the best, but the only accurate way to order the living world. But she learned differently. Sure, there is a method of biological classification by Kingdom, Phylum, and on down to Genus and Species, and scientists still use it, but it is based mostly on appearances (thus the _umwelt_). Carl Linnaeus was only 28 when he published _Systema Naturae_, which is still used. Because he was looking at appearances, Linnaeus made mistakes; whales, in his view, were fish, for instance. Anthropologists have found that people everywhere tend to use a two-name classification system, and that they share the sort of family hierarchy of ordering to which Linnaeus gave a scientific imprimatur. It all got more complicated as Charles Darwin looked through his microscope in trying to classify barnacles. He was doing this to take a break from his devastating ideas of evolution which he had yet to publish, but barnacles are full of surprises. Darwin found that distinct boundaries between species were hard to establish. Species were blurred, and as he was to make clear, they change. The twentieth century brought its own complications. It wasn't the appearance of species that counted in classifying them, it was their molecules, a battle Yoon calls "molecules vs. morphology," and it has caused surprising changes. You'd think, for instance, that lungfish and salmon would be closely related, with cows being only distantly related to either, but you'd be as wrong as Linnaeus was about the whale being a fish. Cows are closer to lungfish than salmon are, and the cladists have data to show it. Not only that, but if you look strictly at evolutionary relationships, the category of "fish" is senseless. There are lots of reptilian species from which fish descended, and the fish belong to those groups, not a "fish" group. Incidentally, the new taxonomists explain that the concept of human races makes no biological sense, and also give the far less emotionally-charged explanation that dinosaurs live on today as birds.
Such counterintuitive classification, Yoon says, is "scientifically and logically unassailable," and she demonstrates how this is so. We have taxonomical, scientific truth for good now, but at what cost? The taxonomists used to have expert eyes and expert opinions based on close association with specimens, often in the field. Cladists don't need such things; give them molecular analyses and statistics, and they will give you a completely objective taxonomy. It may be the march of science, but it is also a step away from the natural world. The rest of us have stepped away already; kids are far better at classifying commercial logos than they are insects. Yoon is in favor of strict scientific classification, certainly, but she also urges us to thumb our noses at it, because in her view current specialists doing taxonomy foster a disconnection from the natural world, a disconnection that, among other things, has resulted in our current round of mass extinctions. This might be a bit of a stretch; there are other factors affecting species loss far more than revolutionary taxonomy. Even so, it is hard not to sympathize with Yoon's call to pay attention to taxonomy and its history, but more importantly to accept fish, and to pay close attention to birds and that shiny bug over there, or a whale if you can get to one. It cannot do you anything but good to connect to nature this way, and you are welcome to attach your own name to the creature, and to sort its place out among others. It's your _umwelt_, after all. "You will begin to notice life where it is, all around you," Yoon writes. "It's not too late."
| | |  | An Interesting, but Disturbing Take on Taxonomy Jan 2, 2010 |
To set the record straight at the start, I am a taxonomist, as well as an ecologist. My specialty is in spiders, of which I've described and named 14 species. I also have some interest in microscopic organisms, especially diatoms. I am quite aware of the problems associated with defining species and also aware that taxonomy is difficult to explain to the layman, and even to some biologists. The world is not organized for our convenience, but it is, I think, of use to at least try to understand what is meant by kingdom, phylum, class, order, species, and populations, even if we decide that some categories are a bit on the fuzzy side. After all evolution has not stopped (even for humans) and thus many species and even higher classifications may seem a bit blurry.
It is with this background (and probable biases) that I examined Carol Kaesuk Yoon's new book "Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science." I was impressed by the many positive reviews that were listed and saw even more on the book website, including at least one scientist I know. Unfortunately in reading the first part of the book I quickly became uneasy. She has invoked the ethological term "umwelt" to define the natural instinct to name things and believes that the re-reinstatement of "instinctive" classifications for organisms (which make whales fish and cassowaries mammals) would make people appreciate nature more. While I think I see her point, I tend to also think, like Quentin Wheeler in another on-line review of the book, that her suggestion does not really solve the problem. In the early 19th Century a U.S. court ruled that for commercial and tax purposes a whale was a fish. Do we not find it easier to kill a fish than a mammal? Is it possible that using "umwelt" principles animal life would become less valuable? Re-instating misconceptions because species and other taxonomic categories are difficult is, in my mind, not the answer. I am quite happy for local peoples to call their local organisms what they want to call them, but scientific concepts of taxonomy, even if changing radically at times, are important not only to the scientists (as Yoon recognizes), but to our whole species as well. I feel very uneasy about her approach and wonder if she will be upset when a whaler takes one of those dumb "fish."
As to her discussion of taxonomy and systematics, I have to admit that like her I was at first a bit put off by cladists, but I have come to think (even noting the difficulties involved in defining shared derived characteristics and the turmoil caused by the results of DNA analysis) cladistics is by far the best game in town. To be fair Yoon does note the utility of the science and resulting phylogenetic trees, but worries that scientists, by not embracing the "umwelt" classifications, are cutting themselves off from a public that simply does not care about such esoteric things. She instead invokes gut feelings. Because of my own personal history I tend to mistrust uninformed gut feelings because I have seen how they can lead one astray. I don't discount them totally, but I prefer to use gut feelings when I have informed myself as much as possible. We do not live in a nice neat perfectly ordered world, but I am suspicious of any philosophy that throws what we do know, even if it is very little, to the wind in favor of a dumbing down.
There are, of course, other ways of classifying organisms. We could classify them by ecological association and place horned larks and prairie dogs together, a sort of "spruce-moose" biome classification. We could classify organisms by their edibility (as many native peoples did for obvious reasons) or by whether they were venomous or poisonous, or useful for folk medicine. I doubt that any scientist would be too disturbed by these alternate classifications, as long as it was noted that they did not reflect genetic relatedness.
Yoon is right that we need to continue to explore and describe new species (alpha taxonomy), no matter how well we can actually do this. It is possible that I am not correctly understanding her arguments, but some of her ideas are pretty jarring. Her suggestion that an early French classification of snakes, crocodiles and slugs as insects should be taken as a valid concept strikes me as not an example of native "umwelt" but of a really quirky way of interpreting nature. I felt very disturbed upon reading her final paragraph when she describes an orca jumping as "the biggest, blackest, most fantastic fish I'd ever seen under a gorgeous blue sky." I have seen orcas myself in the San Juan Islands and I will wager that their being mammals awed me at least as much as her seeing them as fish! | | | | DNA of fungi closer to human than to tomato Dec 23, 2009 |
| I always wondered why the Bible tells of Adam naming the animals. Now I know. I always wondered why mushrooms seem so important. Now I know. I always wondered why young boys obsess over the scientific names of dinosaurs. Now I know. I always wondered why early explorers called whales 'fish', and why that bothered me. Now I know. This book explains an essential component of the human hard-wiring that I never even considered. And this book builds upon that concept, touches upon other connected studies, and eventually wraps up the discussion expertly and satisfactorily. I now have NEW info that I understand.I have only one blurry area in all of this that I will mention here in hopes that the author or another reader will explain. The cover illustration is a painting called ' The Starling'. It seems to show a very large starling with no perspective and it's beak open. All the other birds pictured have food. I can see no connection between this painting and the ideas in the book. Help me, please, someone. Otherwise, this book is FANTASTIC. | | | | Delightful account, but look at other sources Nov 22, 2009 |
This book is a delightful popular account of taxonomy--specifically, animal classification--written in an engaging style.
However, anyone using it as a serious source (whether a term paper or class project or a full-scale historical study) should look at some other sources. Yoon tends to simplify.
On taxonomy before Linnaeus, check Tim Birkhead's THE WISDOM OF BIRDS, which properly credits earlier classifiers from the Greeks through John Ray. Also Wilfred Blunt's biography of Linnaeus. There are other sources.
On Ernst Mayr and the lumper/splitter controversy, which Yoon tends to play as an arbitrary matter of dry-as-dust taxonomists, definitely check out Mayr's own classic, ANIMAL SPECIES AND EVOLUTION (1963). (Every biologist should read that book in any case.)
Yoon tends to follow some cladists in seeing taxonomy as rather a wasteland before cladistics. Readers might want to check this against debates in the scientific literature; no one best source suggests itself, but a computer search will turn up plenty of articles.
| | |  | Kindle version omits graphics Sep 22, 2009 |
This is quite a good book.
The Kindle version, however, cannot be recommended. The graphics in the book are entirely omitted, and while the book does not make heavy use of graphics, at some points the exposition depends upon them rather heavily. | | | Write your own review about Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science
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