To set the record straight at the start, I am a taxonomist, as well as an ecologist. My specialty is in spiders, of which I've described and named 14 species. I also have some interest in microscopic organisms, especially diatoms. I am quite aware of the problems associated with defining species and also aware that taxonomy is difficult to explain to the layman, and even to some biologists. The world is not organized for our convenience, but it is, I think, of use to at least try to understand what is meant by kingdom, phylum, class, order, species, and populations, even if we decide that some categories are a bit on the fuzzy side. After all evolution has not stopped (even for humans) and thus many species and even higher classifications may seem a bit blurry.
It is with this background (and probable biases) that I examined Carol Kaesuk Yoon's new book "Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science." I was impressed by the many positive reviews that were listed and saw even more on the book website, including at least one scientist I know. Unfortunately in reading the first part of the book I quickly became uneasy. She has invoked the ethological term "umwelt" to define the natural instinct to name things and believes that the re-reinstatement of "instinctive" classifications for organisms (which make whales fish and cassowaries mammals) would make people appreciate nature more. While I think I see her point, I tend to also think, like Quentin Wheeler in another on-line review of the book, that her suggestion does not really solve the problem. In the early 19th Century a U.S. court ruled that for commercial and tax purposes a whale was a fish. Do we not find it easier to kill a fish than a mammal? Is it possible that using "umwelt" principles animal life would become less valuable? Re-instating misconceptions because species and other taxonomic categories are difficult is, in my mind, not the answer. I am quite happy for local peoples to call their local organisms what they want to call them, but scientific concepts of taxonomy, even if changing radically at times, are important not only to the scientists (as Yoon recognizes), but to our whole species as well. I feel very uneasy about her approach and wonder if she will be upset when a whaler takes one of those dumb "fish."
As to her discussion of taxonomy and systematics, I have to admit that like her I was at first a bit put off by cladists, but I have come to think (even noting the difficulties involved in defining shared derived characteristics and the turmoil caused by the results of DNA analysis) cladistics is by far the best game in town. To be fair Yoon does note the utility of the science and resulting phylogenetic trees, but worries that scientists, by not embracing the "umwelt" classifications, are cutting themselves off from a public that simply does not care about such esoteric things. She instead invokes gut feelings. Because of my own personal history I tend to mistrust uninformed gut feelings because I have seen how they can lead one astray. I don't discount them totally, but I prefer to use gut feelings when I have informed myself as much as possible. We do not live in a nice neat perfectly ordered world, but I am suspicious of any philosophy that throws what we do know, even if it is very little, to the wind in favor of a dumbing down.
There are, of course, other ways of classifying organisms. We could classify them by ecological association and place horned larks and prairie dogs together, a sort of "spruce-moose" biome classification. We could classify organisms by their edibility (as many native peoples did for obvious reasons) or by whether they were venomous or poisonous, or useful for folk medicine. I doubt that any scientist would be too disturbed by these alternate classifications, as long as it was noted that they did not reflect genetic relatedness.
Yoon is right that we need to continue to explore and describe new species (alpha taxonomy), no matter how well we can actually do this. It is possible that I am not correctly understanding her arguments, but some of her ideas are pretty jarring. Her suggestion that an early French classification of snakes, crocodiles and slugs as insects should be taken as a valid concept strikes me as not an example of native "umwelt" but of a really quirky way of interpreting nature. I felt very disturbed upon reading her final paragraph when she describes an orca jumping as "the biggest, blackest, most fantastic fish I'd ever seen under a gorgeous blue sky." I have seen orcas myself in the San Juan Islands and I will wager that their being mammals awed me at least as much as her seeing them as fish!
