“That which we call a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.” — William Shakespeare

By DR. CAMERON BARROWS 

Granted, it would smell just as sweet, but calling it a daisy or a lupine would sow no end of confusion. Names are important means of conveying information, of ensuring we are all referring to the same thing, the same species, and conveying relationships to other similar things or species. That which we call roses are related to all other flowers within the family Rosaceae. Roses typically have five petals and an abundance of centrally located stamens. Those characters unite chamise, ribbonwood, mountain mahogany, toyon, and blackbrush, all as members of the Rosaceae, and so share a common ancestor with the cultivated roses in gardens around the world. Yet less than 300 years ago there was no system in place for naming plants and animals and fungi, or anything found in nature. Different villages would have their own names for the animals and plants in their neighborhoods. Meaningful to them, but there was no common vocabulary to describe their nature to other groups. No consistent way to communicate information and knowledge.

In the early 1700s a young Swede, Carl Linnaeus, was trying to find his position in European society. Being the son of a preacher placed him in the middle to upper middle class, a status he desperately wanted to keep and improve upon. His only real passion was natural history, but that provided little or no income. He explored being a physician, but like Charles Darwin a century later, he was not much of a student. Nevertheless, he had a grand idea, no less than devising a master plan for the organization of life on Earth. Linnaeus’ master plan was to be based on natural relationships among species, a common morphology that would identify close relationships, although he did not connect those relationships to anything akin to evolution. Rather, as a devout son of a preacher, he believed that all life on Earth in the 1700s had survived the Flood by riding upon Noah’s Ark. He used the reported dimensions of the Ark, 442 feet long, 44 feet wide and three stories totaling 73 feet tall, to then calculate how many species of animals there were and how much plant material there would then have been needed to feed them (the seeds of which would then have re-greened Earth), to then estimate just how many species he would need to include in his master plan, his Systema Natura. He estimated somewhere between 20,450 to 23,000 species of plants would be the target for his effort. It turned out to be an underestimate. Today there are 350,396 described species of plants, and an estimated 400,000 to700,000 if all species were identified.

Despite miscalculating just how many species would be included in his opus, his genius was in focusing on natural relationships among species. For mammals that included teeth, numbers and patterns of canines, incisors, premolars, and molars. For plants it included the numbers and arrangements of stamens and pistils. As sensible as that seems today, his approach was met with considerable push-back, from some who saw no need to create a common system for cataloging nature, to others who considered his approach to be loathsome harlotry, as it was based on the sexual activities of plants.   

With his master plan, Linnaeus created a hierarchy of relationships between species. The most general being his three Kingdoms: plants or animals or minerals. Today minerals are not included, but three others, fungi, protists, and Monera make a total of five kingdoms. Next, in increasing specificity, there is the phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. Of course, this is the most common taxonomic structure still in use today and is testimony to Linnaeus’ genius. Which is not to say he still didn’t make a few mistakes along the way. Under his Kingdom Animalia, he included six classes, Mammalia (mammals), Aves (birds), Amphibia (amphibians), Pices (fish), Insecta (insects), and Vermes (worms).  What’s missing? Reptiles, arachnids, millipedes, and centipedes to name a few. Linnaeus didn’t forget them, he just combined arachnids into Insecta (got to count those legs and body parts), and reptiles, millipedes and centipedes were packed into Vermes. Apparently, Vermes was Linnaeus’ wastebasket for species that didn’t otherwise seem to fit the structure he devised. That, and that other than snakes, there are few if any lizards in Sweden or any part of northwestern Europe. Snakes were, in Linnaeus’ world view, worm-like, and he had few if any opportunities to encounter a lizard. Another problem was in Amphibia he included not only frogs, toads, and salamanders, but also alligators, crocodiles, walruses, and beavers. For Linnaeus, being able to live portions of your life both in water and on land superseded any other obvious morphological differences or similarities. That, and his passion was always with plants.

While one may be inclined to criticize a document first published in 1735, it is important to acknowledge the herculean effort it required and how its broad structure is still in use today. Today our ability to discern species and family relationships is increasingly based on genomics, a tool Linnaeus never could have envisioned. For those of us who learned plant families under the Linnaean structure, recent changes based on genetics, ignoring the Linnaean focus of flower structure (the sexual activities of plants, however tawdry) have and will continue to be a challenge to learn. Knowledge, however challenging, is good.

For a deeper dive into this topic, Jason Roberts’ new book (2024), “Every Living Thing” is a must read.

Nullius in verba – Go outside, tip your hat to a chuckwalla (and a cactus), and think like a mountain