Naming Nature
Book description
Biologist Carol Kaesuk Yoon explores the historical tension between evolutionary biology and taxonomy. Carl Linnaeus struggled in the eighteenth century to define species in light of their mutability while still relying on intuitive, visual judgments. As taxonomy modernized, it moved into labs, yielding results counterintuitive to humanity's innate predisposition to…
Why read it?
1 author picked Naming Nature as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
This book revolves around the term “umwelt,” which refers (in biology) to a creature’s sense of the world around it based on the information that it can perceive; while reading this book, I found my own personal understanding of the way we, as humans, see and categorize our surroundings grow and deepen.
I loved learning and thinking about eons of humans being independently and collectively stumped about the origins of some species and yet often all coming to a similar way of organizing the world around us. The natural world has unfolded in beautiful and bizarre ways, and I enjoy…
From Iris' list on the mysteries of nature.
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