Jason Furman's Reviews > Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science

It wasn't until I was thirty-eight years old that I learned there was no such thing as fish. Specifically, the most recent common ancestor of sharks, lambreys and salmon is also an ancestor of snakes, bats, and pigeons. And in some cases what we call "fish" are actually more closely related to mammals (via our ancestor that made its way out of the water) than they are to salmon.

So when I saw a book that began with a chapter on the death of fish I was intrigued. This book is a history of taxonomy, from Carl Linnaeus to the raging cladists. But more interestingly, it is about the evolutionary biology of our taxonomical abilities. Specifically, being able to tell edible from non-edible, threatening from non, etc., confers an evolutionary advantage -- and thus our ability to classify nature is something that we share with many animals and has evolved.

The thesis of the book is that the history of taxonomy is the struggle between abstract science and our instincts. And that the death of fish is the ultimate blow to our instincts. Personally, I think this is what makes science exciting, substituting rigor for instinct. And parallels (in a much simpler fashion) the way the general relativity and quantum mechanics force us to think in ways that are deeply contradictory to the macroscopic world we live in.

Yoon, however, seems to think that going against our instincts is the problem with taxonomy. And more strangely, that our mistreatment of the environment is somehow related to taxonomy becoming increasingly divorced from our instincts -- whether or not the vast majority of the population even know that was happening.

This isn't the main reason I only gave the book 3-1/2 stars. Largely that is because it was overly repetitive and superficial. All that said, the overall thesis and the first chapter were intriguing enough that I don't regret reading it.