[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]In the book of Genesis,[.small-caps] God presents Adam with “every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens … to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.” It is as if God extends his work to humankind: creation is incomplete until Adam names it. The animal with stripes and hooves becomes a zebra, and the bird with a rusty chest becomes a robin. While the generation of animals is a mystery that belongs to God alone, observing, understanding, and naming is a task given to humankind. [.article__paragraph--cap]

Every Living Thing, a nonfiction account of the origins of the fields of biology and taxonomy by writer Jason Roberts, digs into the ways that humans have tried to understand the relationship between the natural world and humankind. Focusing primarily on the rivalry between Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist who formalized binomial nomenclature – the modern system for naming organisms – and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, a French naturalist whose work anticipated Darwinian science, Roberts centers his book on questions of knowledge: Can we create a system into which all of the world is neatly categorized, or must every individual specimen be considered, defying all imposed systems, before we can reach a closer understanding of nature?

Roberts’s writing on Linnaeus and Buffon is thorough, providing excellent historical context and an impressive degree of detail about the lives of these two men and others in their orbits. Linnaeus spent his life developing a system of categories into which any specimen might be neatly placed. In this approach, nature conforms to human intelligence and technology: the Linnaean method is premised on the idea that flora and fauna can be divided according to attributes and then categorized. These categories, in turn, intuit even more about species, such as how they might be related, even if the specimen is not the “ideal.” This system, Roberts suggests, was used to perpetuate racism in the way followers of the Linnaean system selected “ideals” of species. Buffon, on the other hand, begins from the position that nature consists of only individual specimens that must be examined in totality and that any human system will unnaturally collapse distinctions. Fitting nature into a premade system fails, in Buffon’s view, because no system can accurately account for all that we Homo sapiens don’t know.

As it turns out, and as Roberts demonstrates, there’s a lot that we don’t know. While both Buffon and Linnaeus made significant contributions to science, after their deaths it seems that technology and discovery began to progress at breakneck speed. In the immediate generation after Linnaeus and Buffon, the political turmoil of the French Revolution coincided with the Linnaean system gaining prominence and becoming the de facto way of understanding biology in the West. From there, advances across Europe and, eventually, America, built from Mendel and Darwin to Watson and Crick to the present, with ever more species discovered that seem to defy every categorization the Linnaean system could muster.

In the end, Roberts returns to nature as an ever-adapting, never-fully-knowable entity, quoting Buffon: “Nature is herself a perpetually living finished product, a worker ceaselessly active, who knows how to employ everything, who in working by herself always on the same resources, far from exhausting them, renders them inexhaustible.” If knowing and naming nature is the task of humankind, it is work that will continue as long as the Earth spins.