Carol Kaesuk Yoon
W.W. Norton, New York
2009; 352 pp
ISBN 978-0-393-06197-0
$27.95 (hardcover)

Naming Nature by Carol Kaesuk Yoon is a chronicle of the rise and fall of the science of taxonomy, from its era of prestige both with scientists and the general public in the times of Linnaeus and Darwin, to its current state of marginalization and its sometimes virulent internal conflicts. At the same time it is a tale of what she calls the umwelt (“perception of the living world and the order within it” [p. 111]) and how it leads all of us to try to order living things around us, and how in the past it mediated our connection to the natural world. Yoon’s central theme is that we are all taxonomists by nature, and that the science of taxonomy began as a natural outgrowth of our basic instinct. She laments the decline in taxonomy’s importance at the moment of a biodiversity crisis and a decline in public interest in the natural world. In the narrative of Naming Nature, taxonomy begins as a natural application of umwelt, but succeeding generations of taxonomists felt they had to “kill” the umwelt to get any respect as scientists. This develops into a rather bizarre thesis that taxonomists themselves are to blame not only for the fix they are in now, but for the alienation from nature by the general public. The first claim is arguably true; the second is the result of a lapsus calami in Yoon’s historical coverage of her topic.

Naming Natureis divided between describing taxonomy as a science and as an instinctive activity. There are six chapters on the former category, on Linnaeus, Darwin, Mayr, phenetics, molecular techniques, and cladistics. The first three of these chapters are well written and the scientific events are clearly described. I found the chapter on Darwin, devoted to an in-depth look at his barnacle monographs, the most interesting of the book. Every popular biography of Darwin stresses how critical his barnacle researches were to his development as an evolutionary scientist, but few have described what he was actually doing with those crustaceans. Yoon’s chapter on Mayr accurately captures both his pivotal position between the era of classical taxonomy and later mechanistic developments, and the practical difficulties in applying his “biological species concept.”

By contrast, the chapter on cladistics (entitled “The Death of the Fish”) is astonishingly superficial. Yoon focuses on the notorious Salmon-Lungfish-Cow incident, inflating it from a relatively minor exchange at a scientific meeting (Gee 2001, Williams and Ebach 2007) into a mythical crusade to crush traditional taxonomists. Yoon correctly describes the goal of cladistics as using synapomorphies to discover monophyletic groups, but becomes so involved in the social shortcomings of individual (but unnamed) cladists that she misses the major problem of cladistics: that synapomorphies are not conveniently labeled as such, and in trying to infer them and deal with the problem of character conflicts, cladistics has largely changed from doing research on taxonomy to research about competing computer algorithms (Rieppel and Kearny 2002, Ebach 2008). It might be that this has more to do with some people’s disenchantment with naming nature, rather than the fact that some cladists might talk loudly and go hot-tubbing (p. 263).

The central section of Naming Nature is a more detailed look at what Yoon calls umwelt: alternative systems of classification by tribal peoples, a fascinating review of the taxonomic instincts of babies, and studies of forms of brain damage that selectively destroy the ability to recognize living beings. Yoon’s central narrative hinges on a supposed conflict between this umwelt and modern taxonomy, but Willi Hennig, going back to earlier work by Konrad Lorenz, explicitly recognized an “intuitive component” to systematics (Rieppel 2003)—which turns out to be identical to Yoon’s umwelt of classical taxonomy.

According to Yoon, taxonomy was at its best when it was most closely aligned to our umwelt, but the evolutionary paradigm caused a rift because we can see differences between organisms but can’t see the evolutionary processes behind these differences. As an alpha taxonomist and occasional cladist, I have a certain sympathy for Yoon’s view, as well as for her nostalgia for classical taxonomy. However, as an explanation for “nature deficit disorder” (Louv 2005), blaming modern “scientific” taxonomy is both simplistic and incorrect. What Yoon describes as the “death of umwelt” was part of a wider “denigration of natural history” (Cotterill and Foissner 2010), spawned not in post-Hennig 1966, but in the early 1900s by New Synthesis reformulations of Darwin. While a genuine advance in the biological sciences, the New Synthesis also spawned a triumphalist mindset that “… all we need to know about evolution comes from Drosophila experiments and the mathematical formulations of population genetics” (Eldredge 2003). Much of the anti-taxonomist prejudice that Yoon describes was also directed by New Synthesis partisans at natural historians in general. The result was to not only force probabilification and reductionism into taxonomy and natural history (now renamed “ecology”), but also to make lay taxonomists and naturalists feel distinctly unwelcome in the formerly friendly halls of academe. If taxonomists are at fault here, it is for meekly accepting their marginalization; only recently has there been some much needed pushback against the politically motivated and spurious claims that taxonomy is “unscientific” (Cotterill and Foissner 2010; Wheeler 2004, 2008).

What is the solution to nature deficit disorder? Taxonomy, which fascinates children and taps into the universal urge to order the life around us, would seem a promising way to jumpstart the reconnecting process. But after claiming (mistakenly) throughout her book that taxonomy has become disconnected from ordinary experience, Yoon is left with little to offer beyond standard exhortations to get out of the mall and away from the TV, along with a strange recommendation that we all go back to a pre-Aristotelian taxonomy, before humans figured out that whales aren’t really fish. Yoon clearly favors an approach to nature not mired in the current reductionism, and in fact there are intuitive paradigms out there to explore (e.g., Hoffmann 2007). However, I doubt Yoon’s anarchy in naming nature will be very effective in sparking or maintaining a new connection between the natural world and us.

 

References Cited

Cotterill, F. P. D., and W. Foissner. 2010.A pervasive denigration of natural history misconstrues how biodiversity inventories and taxonomy underpin scientific knowledge. Biodivers. Conserv. 19: 291-303.

Ebach, M. 2008.O cladistics, where art thou? Cladistics 24: 1-2.

Eldredge, N. 2003. Presentation of the Paleontological Society Medal to Stephen Jay Gould. J. Paleontol. 77: 812.

Gee, H. 2001. Deep time: Cladistics, the revolution in evolution. Fourth Estate, London.

Hoffmann, N. 2007. Goethe’s science of living form: the artistic stages. Adonis Science Press, Hillsdale, NY.

Louv, R. 2005.Last child in the woods: saving our children from nature deficit disorder. Algonquin Books, Chapel Hill, NC.

Rieppel, O. 2003.Semaphoronts, cladograms and the roots of total evidence. Biol. J. Linn. Soc.80: 167-186.

Rieppel, O., and M. Kearney. 2002.Similarity. Biol. J. Linn. Soc. 75: 59-82.

Wheeler, Q. D. 2004.Taxonomic triage and the poverty of phylogeny. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B. Biol. Sci. 359: 571-583.

Wheeler, Q. D. 2008. Introductory: Toward the new taxonomy, pp. 1-17. In Q. D. Wheeler [Ed.]. The new taxonomy. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL.

Williams, D. M., and M. C. Ebach. 2007. The foundations of systematics and biogeography. Springer, New York.

 

        R. Wills Flowers
Center for Biological Control
Florida A&M University
Tallahassee, FL 32307
(E-mail) rflowers7@earthlink.net
 

American Entomologist
Vol. 57, No.2, Summer 2011