Product Description

The surprising, untold story about the poetic and deeply human (cognitive) capacity to name the natural world. Two hundred and fifty years ago, the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus set out to order and name the entire living world and ended up founding a science: the field of scientific classification, or taxonomy. Yet, in spite of Linnaeus’s pioneering work and the genius of those who followed him, from Darwin to E. O. Wilson, taxonomy went from being revered as one of the most significant of intellectual pursuits to being largely ignored. Today, taxonomy is viewed by many as an outdated field, one nearly irrelevant to the rest of science and of even less interest to the rest of the world.

Now, as Carol Kaesuk Yoon, biologist and longtime science writer for the New York Times, reminds us in Naming Nature, taxonomy is critically important, because it turns out to be much more than mere science. It is also the latest incarnation of a long-unrecognized human practice that has gone on across the globe, in every culture, in every language since before time: the deeply human act of ordering and naming the living world.

In Naming Nature, Yoon takes us on a guided tour of science’s brilliant, if sometimes misguided, attempts to order and name the overwhelming diversity of earth’s living things. We follow a trail of scattered clues that reveals taxonomy’s real origins in humanity’s distant past. Yoon’s journey brings us from New Guinea tribesmen who call a giant bird a mammal to the trials and tribulations of patients with a curious form of brain damage that causes them to be unable to distinguish among living things.

Finally, Yoon shows us how the reclaiming of taxonomy—a renewed interest in learning the kinds and names of things around us—will rekindle humanity’s dwindling connection with wild nature. Naming Nature has much to tell us, not only about how scientists create a science but also about how the progress of science can alter the expression of our own human nature. 27 illustrations.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #23764 in Books
• Published on: 2009-08-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780393061970
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In this entertaining and insightful book, New York Times science writer Yoon sets out to document the progression of the scientific quest to order and name the entire living world—the whole squawking, scuttling, blooming, twining, leafy, furry, green and wondrous mess of it from Linnaeus to present-day taxonomists. But her initial assumption of science as the ultimate authority is sideswiped by her growing interest in umwelt, how animals perceive the world in a way idiosyncratic to each species, fueled by its particular sensory and cognitive powers and limited by its deficits. According to Yoon, Linnaeus was an umwelt prodigy, but as taxonomists began to abandon the senses and use microscopic evidence and DNA to trace evolutionary relations, nonscientists' gave up their brain-given right (and tendency) to order the living world, with the devastating result of becoming indifferent to the current mass extinctions. Yoon's invitation for laypeople to reclaim their umwelt, to take one step closer to the living world and accept as valid the wondrous variety in the ordering of life, is optimistic, exhilarating and revolutionary. (Aug.)
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Review
Brightly blending scientific expertise with personal experience, Yoon is an outstanding science writer who takes a seemingly dull topic and rivets unsuspecting readers to the page. (Kirkus Reviews )

Evolutionary biologist Carol Kaesuk Yoon makes the case for looking, touching, listening, making our own imperfect sense of the marvels that surround us. Like Darwin, Yoon can find the beauty in a barnacle, and her book—lush with biology, biography, and folklore—is a sensuous delight to read. (Cathleen Medwick - O Magazine )

Impossible to put down. (Booklist )

Starred Review. Yoon’s invitation for laypeople to reclaim their umwelt, to ‘take one step closer to the living world’ and accept as valid the ‘wondrous variety in the ordering of life’ is optimistic, exhilarating, and revolutionary. (Publishers Weekly )

From the Back Cover
Advance praise for Naming Nature:

“Original, delightful, and wise. . . . Yoon descends from the best writers of popular science, Stephen Jay Gould and Brian Greene among them.”—Sue Halpern, author of Four Wings and a Prayer: Caught in the Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly

“Naming Nature will be enjoyed by every biologist, birder, and general nature lover.”—Paul R. Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies, Stanford University, and author of The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment

“Naming Nature is rich with prickly characters, from Linnaeus to Ernst Mayr to Willi Hennig, who animate the fascinating story of how science has learned to find a deep orderliness within life’s diversity.”—David Quammen, author of The Reluctant Mr. Darwin  

“To name is to know is to be able to love, and that is biodiversity’s last best hope: Such is the thesis of this compelling, quirky, beautifully written guide.”—David Takacs, author of Philosophies of Paradise: The Idea of Biodiversity

“A fascinating history of science, an illumination of nature’s improbable exuberance, and a thoughtful evaluation of occasional conflict between man-made definitions and living reality.”—Deborah Blum, author of Monkey Wars

“Optimistic, exhilarating and revolutionary.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Customer Reviews

Delightful, thought provoking look at our "need" to name the living world
I read Carol Yoon's piece in the New York Times two weeks ago, and thought it was one of the most eye opening, refreshing pieces about the natural world and science that I'd ever read. So I decided to invest in the book, although I was skeptical that she could sustain the enthusiasm of the NYT piece. I was wrong: The book is excellent! On just about every page, I found myself saying to friends, "Hey, did you know..." The book is for the same audience who reads Jared Diamond, E.O. Wilson, and/or Stephen Jay Gould, except Carol Yoon's voice is fresher, more spontaneous, more intimate. Really, I think the book is for anyone who loves the natural world, and wants to think harder about our relationship with that world, and/or who wants to enjoy more fully our time spent in nature.

--Phil in St. Louis

A very funny, engaging, thought-provoking book
A great, funny story about the trouble scientists had in creating an objective science of how to name nature. The author had planned to tell the story about how science triumphed over intuition in ordering the living world, but found that the story was instead about how central this order is to our very humanity, and of how we should not give up our instinctual ability to see it, just because science sees it differently. The first thing Adam did was to name the animals, and it is animals, coincidentally, that are almost always among the first thing that toddlers learn to name. The fields of anthropology, psychology and medicine provide more evidence of how the order we see in nature is not only innate, but also crucial to daily life. The order that the new taxonomy has uncovered poses a direct challenge to the order that seems obvious to us. For example, science finds that there are no fish or zebras as distinct groups of animals. This seemingly absurd determination didn't go down well with established taxonomy either, and Yoon's often firsthand account of the struggle to abandon old (innate) ways of thinking about life by very human scientists is highly entertaining. This book gives you a real sense of how science is done, what scientists actually do, and that you, too, have a role to play. You will enjoy this book if you are at all interested in biology, biodiversity, plants, animals and thinking about what makes us human.

A truly enjoyable read
Like another reviewer, I read the piece in the NY Times and enjoyed it enough that I pre-ordered the Kindle edition of this book. I'm very glad I did. As a records and information manager I have experience with a different kind of taxonomy - ordering documents in ways that allow the right information to be found by the right person at the right time - but there are enough similarities to the struggles in ordering and naming living things that I could feel kinship with the various players discussed in this book. The writing style the author uses is elegant and clear. Themes and phrases are repeated multiple times and help each new segment build upon the one before it. What could have been annoying repetition was instead a kind of binder that held all the little pieces of the narrative together from start to finish. I can highly recommend this book to others as just a good read or as a history of how things are named. I enjoyed it for both.