Every Living Thing is a wonderful account of two men in a competition of their own making to name every living creature on earth. They were nearly exactly contemporaries, being born only months apart—Carl Linnaeus, born May 1707, while Buffon was born in September 1707—yet polar opposites in their approach to life. Though neither were particularly good students, they had well-functioning minds that could focus intently.
Linneaus (whose system ended up “winning”) was poor, short, and not very good looking. He started training to be a pastor but got sidetracked into botany. To support his botany habits, he sought an ersatz medical degree and leveraged himself into being the man who treated all of Swedish military’s syphilis cases. He felt that living things should be labeled in tight little boxes of similar animals as observed by man, and some of his observations led to rather bizarre couplings and included animals such as the hydra (which he debunked as being a real animal).
In the other corner, tall, good looking, wealthy Georges-Louis de Buffon, who kept the French royal gardens felt that life was too complex to categorize in ill-fitting boxes and favored a more dynamic approach. He built a forest around his home and devised experiments to see which woods responded best to what sort of treatment. His thinking was quite advanced for the time as he co-invented some mathematical theories and worked with probability. Charles Darwin, a century later had to admit that Buffon’s theories of evolution were much like Darwin’s own.
Each man sincerely thought that the world contained a limited number of species, and each spent much of their lives trying to catalog these. The French Revolution did in poor Monsieur de Buffon, leaving us with Linnaeus’s cumbersome archaic system that is getting further and further out of date as more and more species are discovered. The story of the rivalry of these two men is a fascinating look at the birth of biology and botany.
And I LOVE the cover!
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Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life (Random House, March 12, 2024) is available through:
Amazon | Barnes & Noble
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