Roberts’s exploration centers on the competing work of Linnaeus and another scientific pioneer, the French mathematician and naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. Of the two, Linnaeus is far better known today. Of course, Roberts notes, the Frenchman did not pursue fame as ardently as did his Swedish rival. Linnaeus cultivated admiration to a near-religious degree; he liked to describe even obscure students like Rolander as “apostles.” Buffon, in his time even more famous as a brilliant mathematician, scholar and theorist, preferred debate over adulation, dismissing public praise as “a vain and deceitful phantom.”
Their different approaches to stardom may partly explain why we remember one better than we do the other. But perhaps their most important difference — one that forms the central question of Roberts’s book — can be found in their sharply opposing ideas on how to best impose order on the planet’s tangle of species.
Linnaeus is justly given credit for applying logic and order to science, standardizing the names, definitions and classifications of research. But his directives were based on an often uncharitable and deeply biased worldview. He saw species, including humans, as needing to be ranked according to European values. Thus, Linnaeus is also credited with establishing racial categories for people.
He placed white Europeans firmly at the top. Homo sapiens Europaeus, as he called it, was blond, blue-eyed, “gentle, acute, inventive.” By contrast, Homo sapiens Afer was dark and, in Linnaeus’s definition, “slow, sly and careless”; Homo sapiens Americanus was red-skinned and short-tempered.
Buffon, far more generous by nature, rejected this racial hierarchy. “The dissimilarities are merely external,” he wrote in 1758, “the alterations of nature but superficial.” Living things were adaptable, he insisted, shaped by the environment. Charles Darwin, who pioneered the theory of evolution, would later call Buffon’s ideas, posed more than a century before the 1859 publication of “On the Origin of Species,” “laughably like my own.”
