Carl linnaeus :- the father of Taxonomy

 Carl Linnaeus - The Father of Taxonomy “No one has been a greater botanist or zoologist. No one has written more books, more correctly,more methodically, from personal experience. No one has more completely changed a wholescience and started a new epoch.” Those were the words used to describe CarlLinnaeus, as written by, well...Carl Linnaeus. If nothing else, the man was certainly notshy about flaunting his accomplishments. But he might not be wrong, though. Carl Linnaeus studied botany his entire lifeand became one of the most prominent experts on the subject. A prolific writer, he completely revolutionizedtaxonomy, which is the science of naming and classifying biological organisms. He named and described around 16,000 differentspecies. The mark he left on taxonomy is still obvioustoday. If you look up the scientific name of anyof the plants he described, their author is so ubiquitous that he is denoted simply bythe letter L. Early Years Carl Linnaeus was born on May 23, 1707, inRåshult, a tiny village in the province of Småland in southern Sweden. He was the eldest of five children to NilsIngemarsson Linnaeus and Christina Brodersonia. His father was a church minister and an amateurbotanist who believed in the importance of a good education. Ever since Carl was a little boy, he and hisfather would take trips through the garden where Nils taught him everything he knew aboutplants. By age 5, Carl already had his own garden. Even as a young child, Linnaeus enjoyed rememberingthe names of every plant, and we’re not talking about their common names, but thelong, complicated ones in Latin. This, however, did not impress his teachersat school. Botany was not considered a “proper subject”like mathematics or theology, yet Carl always prioritized his botanical studies over theother subjects. Because of this, he was always a middlingstudent who wasn’t considered good enough for college by his educators. Fortunately, there was one exception - a teachernamed Johan Rothman. Besides teaching, he was also a medical doctorand recognized that Carl’s passion for botany could parlay very well into a career in medicine. He not only encouraged Nils to put his sonon this path, but also took Carl into his home and tutored him in physiology and anatomy. In 1727, the 21-year-old Linnaeus enrolledat the University of Lund to study medicine. He did so under his Latin name, Carolus Linnaeus,a moniker he also used on all the papers he wrote in Latin. Later on, he also adopted the name Carl vonLinné after he became a noble, but we’re still a few decades away from that. Linnaeus’s time at Lund was brief. After just a year, he transferred to UppsalaUniversity because he believed they had a better botany course. As it turned out, the exact opposite was true. The course was quite poor, but this actuallyworked in Carl’s favor. In just a short while, he became one of themost knowledgeable people on botany in the entire university, teachers included. In his second year, he wrote a paper on thereproduction of plants called Praeludia Sponsaliorum Plantarum. It impressed one of the medical professors,Olof Rudbeck, to the point where he considered that Linnaeus should be teaching botany, notstudying it. And so it was that, at just 23 years of age,Carl Linnaeus became a lecturer at one of the country’s leading universities. A Trip to Lapland It was during these early years of teachingthat Carl Linnaeus began growing dissatisfied with the current system of plant classificationand started thinking of ways to improve it. He also wrote several manuscripts which wouldlater become the groundwork for some of his most important works such as Critica Botanicaand Genera Plantarum. However, getting them published required eitherhaving money or a reputation and, at the moment, Linnaeus had neither so he had to wait fora more opportune time. In 1732, the Royal Society of Sciences inUppsala funded a research expedition for Linnaeus to Lapland, the most northern province ofthe country. By the way, this shouldn’t be confused withthe region of the same name found today in Finland which did not exist back then as thewhole of Lapland was still part of the Swedish Realm. The main goal of the expedition was to collectand document as many plants and animals as possible in the hopes of finding new species. This trip would have imitated a similar journeymade by Rudbeck a few decades prior. Unfortunately for him, he had lost all theextensive notes he took in a fire. Linnaeus set off on May 12, 1732, shortlybefore his 25th birthday. It took him almost half a year to make the1250-mile journey which he traveled on foot and by horse. Even though Lapland was not considered a particularlybiodiverse region, the young botanist still managed to find and collect around 100 newplant species. His discoveries formed the basis for one ofhis most important books - the Flora Lapponica. Published originally in 1737 in Amsterdam,it was an account of all the plants that Linnaeus encountered during his trip, describing over500 species in detail. The information in the book was significant,but what truly made it noteworthy was the fact that Linnaeus put into practice, forthe first time, his new binomial nomenclature system which made him famous and is stillused today in taxonomy. Binomial nomenclature simply means a “two-termnaming system.” With this method, most species on the planetcan be named using only two words. These are usually in Latin, although it hasbecome common to use modern words, usually the names of people or places, and simplyadapt them to the Latin grammatical form. The first word - the generic name - designatesthe genus of the species, the genus being a higher category into which similar organismscan be grouped. The second term is the specific name whichis used to identify only that certain species. This method was not only easy and practical,but it brought some much-needed order in an area that was ruled by chaos. Taxonomy had been practiced since ancienttimes. Aristotle was one of the first to classifyanimals by shared attributes. The science continued during medieval timesand the Renaissance, but it was incredibly confusing since many scientists liked to uselong, descriptive terms to name species. There was also no international body to officiallyestablish the name of a species so it was entirely possible for the same organism tobe described in multiple books under different names. The common briar rose is a good example ofthis problem. In Linnaeus’s time, he found it under twodifferent names. One of them was Rosa sylvestris inodora seucanina and the other was Rosa sylvestris alba cum rubore, folio glabro. Besides the fact that both refer to the sameplant, neither name is particularly easy to remember. Using Linnaeus’s method, it simply becameknown as Rosa canina. To give proper credit where it is due, Linnaeuswas not the first to use only two words to name and classify plants. A Swiss botanist named Gaspard Bauhin didit a hundred years before him. Indeed, Linnaeus was aware of his work andeven retained many names originally devised by Bauhin. However, the Swiss botanist never developedhis idea into a system which he implemented universally. Bauhin simply liked using as few words aspossible while still ensuring that they were descriptive enough to identify a species. Sometimes two words were enough but, in othercases, he would use three or four or however many he felt were necessary. Using the Linnaean system, the specific namedid not have to describe the species. Oftentimes, it was named after a person ora place, which meant that one word was enough to act as a unique identifier. Linnaeus would go on to further improve andrefine his system, as did scientists who came after him, but this was good enough for now. The Hydra and the Banana While writing Flora Lapponica, Linnaeus continuedto teach courses at the university in Uppsala. Technically, though, he was still a studentand, eventually, he concluded that it might be time to actually graduate. Of course, by this time, given his knowledgeand experience, graduation was merely a formality, one which he wanted to get on with as fastas possible. Therefore, in 1735, he switched universitiesagain. This time, he traveled to the University ofHarderwijk in the Netherlands as it had a reputation of awarding degrees quickly. One of the oddest experiences of his lifeoccurred on the way to the university. He stopped off in Hamburg where he becamea guest of the burgermeister who was their equivalent of a mayor. The official wanted to show off an incrediblyrare and valuable curiosity which he had in his collection - a stuffed hydra. Allegedly, it had been killed hundreds ofyears prior and looted from a church. Since it came to be in the possession of themayor, the Hamburg Hydra had stirred quite a bit of interest in Europe and the localpolitician was simply waiting for the end of a bidding war to see who offered the highestprice for it. Linnaeus was not impressed with the oddity. He clearly saw it for what it actually was- a fake made by gluing different animal parts together and covering them in snake scales. However, he wasn’t exactly tactful or diplomaticin his debunking of the Hamburg Hydra. He made his observations public immediately,also suggesting that, since it came from a church, it was most likely done to resemblethe biblical beast rather than the hydra from Greek mythology. Unsurprisingly, the value of the stuffed creaturewent down the toilet and the Mayor of Hamburg found that he could no longer sell it fora large sum of money. Feeling that he was no longer welcome, Linnaeustook his leave and made a swift getaway out of Hamburg. The Swedish botanist arrived in Harderwijkand got his diploma. He knew that he could graduate fast, but noteven he expected things to go as smoothly as they did. Linnaeus had already written a paper on thecauses of malaria which he submitted as his doctoral thesis. It was called “Inaugural thesis in medicine,in which a new hypothesis on the cause of intermittent fevers is presented. By the favour of God, three times the bestand the greatest, submitted by Carolus Linnæus from Småland, Sweden, a Wredian scholar.” In it, the Swedish scientist got some thingsright and some things wrong. Linnaeus opined that a common type of wormwoodcalled Artemisia annua would work as a remedy against malaria. This was 240 years before Chinese researcherTu Youyou actually extracted a compound called artemisinin from the plant and used it tosuccessfully make antimalarial drugs. However, he incorrectly concluded that malariawas caused by very small clay particles because all the regions with high instances of theillness had soil rich in clay. Either way, the university was sufficientlyimpressed with the thesis and, within two weeks, Carl Linnaeus became a doctor of medicine. Also around this time in the Netherlands,Linnaeus added another impressive, but unusual accolade to his résumé - he became the firstman to successfully grow a banana in Europe. Back then, this was a grand ambition of botanists. Many of them managed to get the banana plantto start growing, but none could make it flower, let alone produce its delicious fruit. This was because the plant preferred a hotterand wetter climate than what Europe could provide. Linnaeus didn’t exactly figure this rightoff the bat, but he adopted a scientific and methodical approach to the problem. He knew that through trial & error he couldachieve conditions which would help the banana grow. Eventually, he gave the plant enough extraheat and water to mimic its natural tropical climate and he was rewarded with a floweringplant full of tasty banana fruit (which, from a botanical perspective, is technically aberry). During his experiments, Linnaeus wrote downextensive notes and observations and later published them so anyone else with a modicumof horticultural skill could also recreate the conditions and grow their own bananas. Later on, he continued his studies and cameup with multiple medical applications for the fruit such as treating coughs, eye inflammations,and bladder problems. Bizarrely, he also became convinced that thebanana was the forbidden fruit found in the Garden of Eden which was eaten by Adam andEve. The Systema Naturae In the Netherlands, Linnaeus met and befriendedseveral people who would play important roles in his career. One of them was a Dutch botanist named JanFrederik Gronovius. He saw one of Linnaeus’s manuscripts wherethe Swedish scientist used his new binomial nomenclature and realized that it had thepotential to revolutionize botany. Gronovius encouraged Linnaeus to write andpublish his ideas. Not only that, but he helped him do it byfinancing his work and by convincing a friend of his, a Scottish doctor named Isaac Lawson,to do the same. Linnaeus always intended to publish his works,it was just a matter of securing the money to do it. This new arrangement was a match made in heaven. And so, in 1735, Carl Linnaeus published,arguably, his most important work - the Systema Naturae or The System of Nature. It was a book on taxonomy, highlighting hisideas on the hierarchy of all the organisms in the world which, of course, used his ownnaming system. This book became a constant presence in Linnaeus’slife as he always kept revising and adding to it. Over the course of 30 years, he published12 different editions of the Systema Naturae, going from a meager 12 pages for his firstedition to over 2,400 pages for his last. It was the first attempt to name all the knownorganisms in the world. It was ambitious but, perhaps, too ambitious. At first, Linnaeus believed that there couldhardly be more than 10,000 species in the world. He eventually changed his tune when he realizedthat he could name around 7,700 flowering plants alone. Besides simply adding more species to theever-growing list, Linnaeus also improved the hierarchy. His taxonomic classification had five levels. From highest to lowest, it included kingdom,class, order, genus, and species. He considered genus and species to be natural,God-given categories, while the other three were human constructs developed to make classificationeasier. Linnaeus believed that all organisms in theworld fell into one of three kingdoms: animals, plants, and minerals. By the 10th edition of the Systema Naturae,which is regarded by many as the definitive version, Linnaeus had divided the animal kingdominto six classes which are, mostly, still recognizable today. They were Mammalia (which included mammals),Aves (comprised of birds), Amphibia (containing amphibians and reptiles), Pisces (comprisedof bony fish), Insecta (which contained all arthropods), and, finally, Vermes (which includedall the other invertebrates without exoskeletons and segmented bodies like worms and molluscs). Plants were grouped into 24 classes. We won’t go into detail for each one, butLinnaeus stressed that his classifications were done purely for identification purposes,he did not regard them as natural groups. That kind of classification he reserved foranother book of his - the Philosophia Botanica published in 1751. For the categorizations in the Systema Naturae,Linnaeus relied on sexual reproduction to group plants, mostly going by the number ofstamen each plant had. The stamen, by the way, is the male fertilizingorgan of the flower, the one that produces pollen. The female organ, the one with the seed, iscalled the pistil. Linnaeus’s classification was quite basic. The class of flowers with one stamen was calledMonandria. The class with two stamen was Diandria. The one with three was Triandria...and soon. There were exceptions, of course, such asCryptogamia which included all ferns, fungi, and algae. Linnaeus’s mineral division was far morebasic and has fallen completely out of use. He grouped them into just three classes: Petraefor rocks, Minerae for minerals, and Fossilia for fossils and sediments. Of course, taxonomy has advanced since thedays of Linnaeus. There aren’t just five main taxonomic ranksanymore, for example, there are eight. But even in his own time, the scientist seemedalways willing to admit his mistakes and make changes which is one of the main reasons whythe Systema Naturae had so many editions. In the first books, he classified whales asfish, for example. Even the thing that made him famous, binomialnomenclature, Linnaeus admitted that sometimes it was not enough so he also introduced trinomialnames or trinomens. The dog, for instance, he considered a subspeciesof the wolf, or Canis Lupus. Therefore, the domestic dog needed a subspecificname to distinguish it so he named it Canis lupus familiaris. A more well-known example is the plains bison,a subspecies of the American bison also known as the buffalo. Because the genus, species, and subspeciesall had the word “bison” in them, Linnaeus gave it the scientific name of Bison bisonbison. A similar example is the western lowland gorillawho has the trinomen Gorilla gorilla gorilla, but that one wasn’t named by Linnaeus. One final interesting little tidbit from theSystema Naturae concerns the common St. Paul’s wort or, to give it its Linnean name, Sigesbeckiaorientalis. Linnaeus ran into conflict with Johann Sigesbeck,an academician who considered the botanist’s idea of using sexual reproduction to classifyplants as “loathsome harlotry” because God would never have allowed such deviantbehavior, referring here to all plants that had more than one male and one female reproductiveorgan. As revenge, Linnaeus named the small and uglyweed after him. Back to Sweden During his time spent in the Netherlands,Linnaeus also made the acquaintance of George Clifford III, a Dutch banker who, as one ofthe directors of the Dutch East India Company, was one of the wealthiest men in the country. More than that, though, Clifford shared Linnaeus’spassion for botany. He owned a large estate called Hartekamp whichwas famous for its massive gardens. Clifford took on Linnaeus as his personalphysician. The Swedish doctor was provided with a generoussalary, free room and board, and, of course, access to one of the most diverse gardensin Europe. His work was not particularly taxing so Linnaeusspent most of his time indulging his botanical interests. He even wrote a book titled Hortus Cliffortianus,describing over 1,200 plant species that were found at Hartekamp. There’s actually a pretty funny story ofhow Linnaeus came to work for Clifford. Prior to that, he was employed by a fellowbotanist named Johannes Burman who also allowed Linnaeus to stay with him. When Clifford made his offer, the Swedishscientist was reluctant to accept as he already promised Burman to stay with him for the winter. For his part, Burman was keen to keep hisprize assistant. Clifford had to tempt him with a rare bookfrom his collection and persuaded Burman to trade Linnaeus for the book. During his time with Clifford, Linnaeus alsomade trips to France and England. There, he befriended other notable botanistsand exchanged ideas but, more importantly, he also showed them his new naming systemwhich many of them adopted over the following years. In 1738, Linnaeus finally returned to Sweden. He married a woman named Sara Elisabeth Moraeaand had seven children together. He then moved to Stockholm where he foundwork as a physician. While there, Linnaeus also founded the RoyalSwedish Academy of Science and became its first president. His stint in Stockholm was short as threeyears later he moved to Uppsala where he became professor of botany and medicine at the universityhe once attended. He was still young at this time - only inhis mid 30s - but he already settled into a nice groove which he maintained for therest of his life. He continued teaching and, more importantly,writing. By the end of his career, Linnaeus had publishedover 30 books, not counting all the different editions of the Systema Naturae. In 1750, he became rector of Uppsala University. Linnaeus regularly took his students on botanicalexpeditions through the most remote parts of Sweden, often at the government’s expense. His most prized pupils became known as theApostles of Linnaeus because they went on expeditions throughout the entire world tospread his teachings, as well as collect rare samples to bring back to the university. Carl Peter Thunberg traveled to Japan, forexample, while Pehr Kalm was the one who visited North America. Perhaps his most notable apostle was DanielSolander, who accompanied James Cook on his first journey to Australia. For his work, Linnaeus was knighted in 1761by King Adolf Frederick. Since then, he took on the name Carl von Linné. In his later years, he found Uppsala too crowdedand noisy so he purchased an estate called Hammarby in the nearby countryside. Eventually, he had to resign as universityrector due to his failing health. He suffered three strokes in five years andthe last one finally killed him on January 10, 1778, aged 70. His vast collection which included tens ofthousands of plants and insects, plus thousands of books and letters was left to his family,who later sold it to a young English botanist named James Edward Smith. Upon his return to London, the wealthy scientistfounded the Linnean Society, helping to ensure that the name Linnaeus will always be inexorablylinked to the world of natural history and taxonomy.