Every Living Thing (2024) by Jason Roberts

 Book Review

Every Living Thing (2024) 

by Jason Roberts

   Every Living Thing is a non-fiction book about the history of the attempts by humanity to scientifically classify life by species. The most famous name is Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist who is generally credited with the classificatory system of life:  kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species.  Linnaeus was operating well in advance of the modern advances in chemistry and biology, i.e. the discovery of dna and genetics, and the major point Roberts makes about him is that he believes that once a species was established, it was immutable, and that renders his entire classificatory system faintly ridiculous.   His system is even more ridiculous today, where genetic analysis has made it quite clear that the scientific basis for up to one third of named species collapses at the genetic level. Roberts also makes the point that we as a species have likely catalogued less than one percent of the existing life on this planet.

 

   As the foil to Linnaeus, Roberts advances Georges Buffon, a French scholar who was making the same arguments that Darwin would raise a generation later, in other words, evolution, but was operating in an environment (Pre-Revolutionary France) where such ideas would have seen him killed.  Buffon argued that species were not consistent over time, that in fact they changed, and the idea of a fixed species through history was absurd.  He lost that argument, and even Darwin hadn't heard of him until he wrote a draft of Origin of Species and someone alerted him to the similarity. 

   Roberts throws in some interesting material about recent discoveries in genetics and DNA that call into question our somewhat settled ideas about those fields, but the meat of the book is devoted to exposing just how wrong, and succesful, Carl Linnaeus was an inventor of the classificatory system of life that we still adhere to today.