For most of the last 20 years, I have attended the weekly discussions of the Evolution Roundtable at Franklin and Marshall College a few blocks from my home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The ERT reads two books each year on evolution, one each semester. We have read books The Origin of Species, The Selfish Gene, and many other books on dinosaurs, DNA and how cells evolve. In the 1990s, before I was part of the group, Stephen Jay Gould visited one of the Monday noon sessions.
If I could recommend just one book of all those I read with the ERT, in fact any single book I read on science, it would be Every Living Thing: the Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life by Jason Roberts. I liked this book from the introduction, but the more I read it, the more I was drawn into the parallel lives of Carl Linnaeus and the Georges-Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon.
These men both lived and worked though much of the 18th Century. Both devoted their lives to classifying every living thing, plus rocks and minerals and even the universe beyond the earth in the case of Buffon. Both men wrote a single work in many volumes with many revisions for their entire lives, describing every sort of life they could find.
During their lifetimes, both were well known. Both suffered tragic and painful deaths. But that's where Roberts tale really took hold of me. He tells the story of how the ideas and reputations of the two men rose and fell after their deaths. This story shows how much science is influenced by culture and politics and the whims of people with an agenda having nothing to do with the work of the scientist.
Linnaeus died in 1778 in Sweden, a country that would remain relatively stable in the centuries ahead. Buffon, a rich French aristocrat, died in 1788 on the eve of the French Revolution. Among the excesses of the French Revolution was erasing anything aristocratic, along with murdering aristocrats. One of the revolutionary committees decided Linnaeus was a man of the people and Buffon should be erased.
The revolutionaries promoted Linnaeus. Buffon and his multi-volume work went into eclipse. Right now on Amazon there are 50 books on Linnaeus plus children's books. Since Linnaeus was a creationist who believed all the species were created by God in the week described in Genesis Linnaeus has a Christian home-school following.
In the mid 19th Century, when Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species it was clear that the work of Buffon had anticipated evolution. When genes were found to be the inner mechanism of life and reproduction, Buffon's work again seemed prophetic. In the 21st Century with millions of species and many more more types of life that are neither plant nor animal, the Linnaean system is being supplanted. Linnaeus thought God created 40,000 species. His system is overloaded with a thousand times more.
Why this book above every other book on evolution? Because Every Living Thing shows the reader the obsession, the rivalry, the passion, the determination of scientific discovery and then shows how history and politics can promote or ignore a lifetime of work. Real science is always changing, always affected by the culture in which it works.
Right now uncertainty will hinder science in America, maybe leading it to flourish elsewhere. Germany was the center of the scientific world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Then the Nazis took over and German science never recovered.
Chance and circumstance affect us all and science no less.
