As, no doubt, many will be posting today, Linnaeus (the "father of modern taxonomy") was born 300 years ago. It's a pity a tiny minority of taxonomists still dont get the genius of what he achieved under the guise of "complet[ing] the Darwinian revolution".
- Log in to post comments
More like this
As promised, I will gather here (and update a couple of times during the day) some of the most interesting posts from around the blogosphere about the celebrations of the 300th birthday of Carl von Linne aka Carolus Linnaeus, the guy you cussed at when, back in high school, you had to memorize the…
David Tyler wonders Would Linnaeus have waved the banner of phylogenomics? He writes:
It may surprise some, but Newton did not pioneer physics with relativity in mind. It is not necessary to presuppose an equivalence between mass and energy to be a scholar working in this field.
Oh, that isn't…
It is often stated in the literature that Linnaeus late in life turned to an evolutionary view based on hybridisation (e.g., Clausen, Keck and Hiesey 1939). I myself have repeated this, but as always it's worth looking at the actual text. Unfortunately I have so little Latin that I can't even use…
In honour of Linnaeus' 300th birthday, and to rescue him from the canard that he merely applied Aristotelian logic to biology, I offer up this essay on his view of classification and species. I do not think Linnaeus was an essentialist in the Mayrian sense - he nowhere specifies that species have…
I think you are being unfair to the Phylocode. When De Candolle formalised the present Linnaean scheme in 1867, he mentioned explicitly that one day it would need to be abandoned as a patchwork system. I don't agree with the Phylocode myself, but it is not because they lack appreciation for Linnaeus.
Yeah, I guess I spent too much time with Quentin Wheeler last week :)