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Every living thing : the great and deadly race to know all life / Jason Roberts.

by Roberts, Jason (President of Panmedia Corporation), author.

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New York : Random House, [2024]

Linné, Carl von, 1707-1778.

Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de, 1707-1788.

Biology -- Classification -- History -- 18th century.

9781984855206 (hardcover) :

1984855204 (hardcover) :

xiv, 407 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Introduction. Savants -- Prelude. The mask and the veil -- Part I. The great chain of being. Of the Linden tree ; A course in starvation ; The salt-keeper's son ; Vegetable lambs and barnacle trees ; Several bridegrooms, several brides ; The greater gift of patience ; Now in blame, now in honor ; The seven-headed hydra of Hamburg ; An abridgment of the world entire ; Loathsome harlotry ; The quarrel of the universals -- Part II. This prodigious multitude. Goldfish for the queen ; Covering myself in dust and ashes ; The only prize available ; Durable and even eternal ; Baobab-zu-zu ; So many new and unknown parts ; Governed by laws, governed by whim ; A general prototype ; Breaking the lens ; My cold years ; The price of time -- Part III. God's registrar. Germinal, floreal, thermidor, messidor ; Transformism and castastrophism ; Platypus ; Laughably like mine ; The rhymes of the universe ; Most human of humans ; A large web or rather a network.

"In the eighteenth century, two men--exact contemporaries and polar opposites--dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster's flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France's royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic swirl of complexities. Each began his task believing it to be difficult, but not impossible: How could the planet possibly hold more than a few thousand species--or as many as could fit on Noah's Ark? Both fell far short of their goal, but in the process they articulated starkly divergent views on nature, the future of the Earth, and on humanity itself. Linnaeus gave the world such concepts as mammal, primate and Homo sapiens, but he also denied species change and he promulgated racist pseudoscience. Buffon formulated early prototypes of evolution and genetics, and warned of global climate change, and argued passionately against prejudice. The clash of their conflicting world views continued well after their deaths, as their successors contended for dominance in the emerging science that came to be called biology."-- Publisher.

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