Creating “God’s Organizer”

One scientist's plan to enter more profoundly into the Mind of the Creator

Image: Carl Linnaeus, newscientist.com

Imagine a past world of biological confusion, where no clear categories corresponded to mammals, birds, amphibians, or insects. In this chaotic world of inconsistent classification, whales and manatees were considered fish, dogs and cats did not belong to different biological families, and humans were not considered biological animals at all. This was a time when the “honey bee” (Apis mellifera) was known as Apis pubescens, thorace subgriseo, abdomine fusco, pedibus posticus glabis, untrinque margine ciliatus (the furry bee with a grayish thorax, brownish abdomen, and hind legs that are bordered with hairs on both sides) and when a common flower such as the daisy (Bellis perennis) was known either by over a thousand different local names (such as Bruisewort, Bone flower, Gowan, or Mary’s Rose) or by an official Latin description of over sixty words.

In this past age, the boundaries between plants, animals, and minerals were not stable, and transmutation was the commonly accepted norm. Here, insects and eels were seen as arising spontaneously from the soil, and barnacle geese were thought to emerge from barnacles on driftwood or dropped from trees. This was the world of biology as it was perceived before the scientifically groundbreaking work of Carl Linnaeus, the founding father of taxonomy and pioneer of Natural History.

Grounded in a deep Scriptural faith that Divine wisdom, logic, and law could be discerned within the terrestrial sphere of rocks, plants, and animals, Linnaeus zealously took on the mantle of Adam to know and name the creatures of God. Seeking to catalogue and understand all of God’s terrestrial creatures, Linnaeus, “God’s organizer,” strove to “catch glimpses of the order that underlaid His plan” so that he could enter more profoundly into the Mind of the Creator.¹

Bringing Order to the Chaos of the Living World

Today, the idea that nature is rationally organized and governed by laws is commonplace, and we take the order within the natural world for granted. In the 1600s, though, before the time of Swedish naturalist, botanist, physician, and explorer Carl Linnaeus, this was not the case. While Medieval Jews and Christians had faith from the Scriptures that the wisdom and logic of God was exhibited in the created realm, they had only just begun to explore how such wisdom was manifested in the harmonious mathematical symmetries of the starry heavens and the material realities of the stony earth. No one at that time had yet attempted to decipher God’s laws, which brought order to the biological realm or to the world of rocks and minerals.

Born on a farm in southern Sweden, Linnaeus inherited his love for nature and plants from his father, who was both a devout Lutheran pastor and an amateur botanist. Like others in his day who had faith in Scripture, Linnaeus believed there was a plan to creation and that it was not chaos. Yet, this Divine plan needed to be discovered, and it was the task of the scientist to disclose it.

Driven by a deep conviction that he was fulfilling a task and vocation that was entrusted to him by God, Linnaeus sought to understand what he believed to be “an overarching natural order, bound by specific—and discernible—laws” that were instituted by God within the created realm on earth.² Following in the footsteps of the primordial human, Adam, who was commissioned to know and name the animals, Linnaeus established the first systematic classification of all known animals, plants, and minerals.

When Linnaeus first embarked on this task, the common names for minerals, plants, and animals were innumerable, and their scientific names were long and cumbersome descriptions. Linnaeus sought to bring simplicity and unity by introducing a Binomial nomenclature system where each type of mineral, animal, and plant was given just two Latin names. He introduced the idea of genus to convey the larger generic grouping of a type and species to convey the more specific instantiation of that type. Animals (or plants) that belonged to a similar genus were subsequently grouped into the larger category of families, similar families were grouped into overarching orders, and similar orders were grouped into classes. For Linnaeus, the most fundamental distinction was that between the three kingdoms—plants, animals, and minerals.

Linnaeus' system of Binomial nomenclature, first proposed in his Systema Naturae of 1735, assigned a unique identification to each specific type of biological organism (and mineral), and it allowed scientists across the world to communicate effectively and avoid confusion about the organisms that they were studying. Employing Latin—the most universal language at the time—for his system, Linnaeus cut through the confusion caused by the myriad of species names found in the common tongues of differing localities.

Beyond just proposing a system of organization, Linnaeus did more than anyone in his day (or since then) to clearly identify different species of animals, plants, and minerals. By the 10th edition of his Systema Naturae, published in 1758, Linnaeus had identified and named over 4,400 species of animals and 7,700 species of plants. By the 12th edition of Systema Naturae, he included nearly 3,000 “Articulata,” mostly insects, and described 1,915 of them for the first time.

In the generations preceding Linnaeus the aquatic mammals were grouped with fish, all four-footed animals—including reptiles, amphibians, and mammals—were all classified according to size, bats were grouped with birds of prey and flying squirrels, and land birds were subdivided according to whether they made their nests on the ground, in bushes, or in trees.³ Systematically endeavoring to modify these prior groupings, Linnaeus proposed a number of new categories that were based on certain key characteristics that the animals in each group had in common.

Among larger categories, he grouped all warm-blooded animals with four-chambered hearts and nursed their young into a group—or class—that he named “Mammalia.” He noted the fact that whales, dolphins, and manatees suckle their young, and he consequently separated them from the fish. Warm-blooded animals with four-chambered hearts that had feathers and laid eggs, he grouped into a class he named “Aves.” Animals with “cartilaginous scales” that live solely in the water, have two-chambered hearts, “swim by means of radiate fins”, and that “breathe by means of gills” he described as the class “Pisces.”⁴

Linnaeus recognized that the class he labeled “Amphibians” was often characterized by two different stages of life, where an organism of the same species would start off by living exclusively in water but then mature into a creature that would breathe air and live on land. Linnaeus also understood that the same species of “insect” (another class that Linnaeus introduced) can appear as either a worm (larva) or a flying creature with legs, depending on its stage in life.

For the first time ever Linnaeus recognized as distinct groups the Coleoptera (beetles), Hemiptera (bugs and aphids), Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths), Neuroptera (lacewings), Hymenoptera (bees and wasps), and Diptera (flies), while all the remaining insect-like organisms were put under Aptera (wingless). This was a clear and logical system that represented “such a great advance that a comparable improvement was not introduced by any entomologist either before or since.”⁵ Linnaeus organized these classes, along with others, into a ranked hierarchy, with “Kingdom” as the most inclusive category and “species” as the most exclusive.

Discovering Species Stability and Reflecting on Common Descent

Image: alberts.edu.in

The ancients believed that species were not constant but always changing, “that they mutated whenever the occasion arose.”⁶ This notion itself is reflected even in the etymological origins of the word species—from the Latin specere, which refers to the changing external appearance of a thing, and not its inward or unchanging essence (as is reflected in the word “specious”).

Neither Aristotle nor Theophrastus—the fathers of zoology and botany, respectively—ever envisioned species as fixed or immutable, and Theophrastus even observed that plants may change their species due to changes in the environmental conditions. For him, it logically followed that “animals mutated more than plants did because, in their migrations from place to place, they experienced many environmental changes while plants grew anchored in one spot.”⁷ Nor did the arrival of Judaism or Christianity in the ancient world bring with it the idea of fixity of species.

In the age before Linnaeus, species were considered specious and were thought to mutate or transform into other species without any rhyme or reason underlying their transmutation. Linnaeus endeavored to construct a coherent classification system in a world in which wheat could give rise to rye, worms could give rise to insects, mud could transform into frogs, and barnacles could transmute into geese. In order to make a case for the systematic classification of life that he was proposing, Linnaeus had to convince the scientific world that species were real units that could be scientifically measured. This meant that species had to be generally stable (or “fixed”) and that they could only transmutate (or evolve) into other species under very special circumstances, such as in the case of hybridization.

Linnaeus based his view of the stability or “fixism” of species on evidence that had been painstakingly gathered from a vast network of horticultural gardens across Europe.”⁸ He tested “the old transmutationist beliefs in the influences of climate on plant forms” by “returning the modified forms to their original locations” and then demonstrating that “the plants then reverted to their original forms.” To test the hypotheses of species stability (or fixism) Linnaeus conducted “careful and controlled breeding programs,” and his “belief in species fixity was supported by an intense program of exchange among horticultural gardens that demonstrated the reversibility of climatic change, together with the constancy of other characters that could be taken as diagnostic of the (fixed) species.”⁹

Through careful observation and meticulously gathered experimental evidence, Linnaeus spearheaded an intellectual revolution in the concept of species. At the time of his pioneering work, “species fixism was a progressive scientific development” and not an ancient doctrine from Greek philosophy or Jewish and Christian theology. While Linnaeus did find inspiration for his concept of “species” or “forms” from the idea of “kinds” in the first chapter of Genesis, he applies the Scriptural language of “kinds” to “species” in order to critique the idea of transmutation between species that was common among Christians in his day.

Before Linnaeus, no one thought to connect the “kinds” in Genesis with stable and fixed species as real scientific units that could be measured. Speaking of plants, Linnaeus writes: “The number of species is the number of different forms produced by the Infinite Being from the beginning; and these forms have produced more forms, according to the laws laid down, but always ones that are similar to themselves.”¹⁰ Linnaeus here is arguing against the idea that one species can rapidly transmute into another species that is of a completely different kind without any sort of reproductive activity between the two different species. While he allows that “Hybrid animals are derived from different species,” he rules out the notion of naturally occurring chimeras.¹¹

While Linnaeus argued that plant and animal species should be thought of as real units, he did not hold that the boundaries of species were entirely fixed or stable in all circumstances. Thus, throughout his life, Linnaeus pursued research in order to better conceive how “new forms can arise by hybridization, a process inherent in creation.” In a number of writings, he points out how “all living things increase and multiply so that a few become many.” Seen another way, this means that “many have come from fewer until we finally derive from a single pair”.

Linnaeus further notes that “dry ground on the earth tends to increase” and “If we reverse this increase, we reach backwards in time to a single small island.” Anticipating a scenario akin to something like the Cambrian explosion, where every phylum of life suddenly appears in the fossil record in a geological instant, Linnaeus introduced the idea that the “creation of plants and animals took place on a small island,” which was the original continent.

He reasoned that “the act of creation itself may have involved only one representative of every order”—that there was a primordial arthropod and a primordia Pisces, etc. Through “crosses between these [primordial creatures] and their descendants,” explains Linnaeus, “genera and species came later.” None of this, though, says Linnaeus, is apart from God’s acts of creation, but rather, “this should be thought of as a single process inseparable from the act of creation.”¹²

Placing Adam Amidst the Animals

Inspired by the Genesis account, in which humans share the same “day” of creation with the land animals, Linnaeus was the first naturalist to formally place humans within the animal kingdom and to classify them with other mammals as the first among equals. Prior to Linnaeus, Renaissance humanists such as Giordano Bruno had argued that man was not “a creature among fellow creatures,” but “superior to the other animals,” unconstrained by the laws of nature, and “himself god of the earth.”¹³

Linnaeus challenged this view of the Enlightened humanists—and their rejection of Scripture—by classifying humans based on shared physical characteristics with other animals, and with primates in particular. Already in the first edition of Systema Naturae Linnaeus places man, Homo, together with the apes, Simiae, within a group that he named the Anthropomorpha (man-like). Later, Linnaeus replaces the name “Anthropomorpha” with “Primates,” but he systematically argues that humans properly belong to this group. Linnaeus writes: “Among all created things there can be no doubt that there is nothing nearer to man than the races of apes; their faces, hands and feet, arms and legs, breasts and viscera are very like ours, even their hundreds of pranks, of being mad and amusing, of imitating everything they see (following a fashion), resemble us so much that it is hardly possible to define a dividing line.”¹⁴

While he says, “many people would like to think that there would be a greater difference between men and apes than between night and day,” Linnaeus argues that this is not biologically the case. Rather, the difference we perceive between humans and apes is based on the advanced degree of technology and culture that some human groups possess while apes do not. Not all humans, however, have the same level of culture and technology.

How, then, can one distinguish humans from animals? To address this question, Linnaeus wrote in 1754 that animals “have not, like us, the ability to put together their sense impressions and draw from them general conclusions.” We differ from animals in “our capacity to collect experiences through speech and writing and to pass these on from generation to generation.” Linnaeus continues: “If we examine man’s internal parts to find out what kind of tools he possesses to perform such a work, and which are lacking in animals, we find absolutely nothing; we must therefore necessarily attribute all this to a nonmaterial component which the Creator has given to man alone and which we call the Soul.”¹⁵

Distinguishing humans within the Primates by their capacity for wisdom, Linnaeus proposed the species name Homo sapiens—“man the one with wisdom.” According to Linnaeus, it is primarily through our wisdom that humans are akin to God. It is through wisdom that man alone can study “the glory of God, as seen from the works of Nature,” and it is through wisdom that “the study of nature will reveal the Divine Order of God's creation.”¹⁶

1. Paul Lawrence Farber, Finding Order in Nature: The Naturalist Tradition from Linnaeus to E. O. Wilson (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 119.

2. Farber, Finding Order in Nature, 6.

3. Sven Hörstadius, “Linnaeus, Animals and Man,” The Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 6 (December 1974): 269-275.

4. Carl Linnaeus, Systema Naturae, 10 Edition.

5. Hörstadius, “Linnaeus, Animals and Man,” 271.

6. Conway Zirkle, “Species before Darwin,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 103:5 (Oct. 15, 1959): 638.

7. Zirkle, “Species before Darwin,” 639.

8. Ron Amundson, The Changing Role of the Embryo in Evolutionary Thought: Roots of Evo-Devo (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 40.

9. Amundson, The Changing Role of the Embryo in Evolutionary Thought, 39.

10. Carl Linnaeus, tr. Stephen Freer, Philosophia Botanica (Oxford University Press, 2003), 113.

11. Linnaeus, Philosophia Botanica, 102.

12. Linnaeus, in Hörstadius, “Linnaeus, Animals and Man,” 274.

13. Giordano Bruno quoted in Richard Bauckham, “Modern Domination of Nature—Historical Origins and Biblical Critique,” in Environmental Stewardship: Critical Perspective—Past and Present, ed. R. J. Berry (T&T Clark, 2006), 36.

14. Linnaeus, in Hörstadius, “Linnaeus, Animals and Man,” 274.

15. Linnaeus, in Hörstadius, “Linnaeus, Animals and Man,” 274.

16. Linnaeus, “Introitus”, Systema Naturae.