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Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science

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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!

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 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.

This book has three (too closely) interwoven threads. The first is a very good history of taxonomy and biological systematics. Second is her description and discussion of what she calls the "umwelt", which should more accurately be described as an "intuitive taxonomy". Third is a rather sloppy claim that scientific taxonomy undercuts our intuitive taxonomy and something (she is unclear as to WHAT) should be done to limit the "damage".

I find the idea of defending our intuitive taxonomy against a more accurate and precise scientific version to be rather foolish, similar to a physicist defending our intuitive physics against Newtonian mechanics. I don't see any real problem with retaining practical divisions, such as her repeated example of "fish", for everyday use even if they are not "taxonomically correct" - there are many ways of dividing the world, and science has little directly to do with most of them. As an everyday example, there is no real basis for our classification of some food plants as vegetables and others as fruits, but we keep it because it is useful.

Although the premise of the book - our instinctual categorization of the world is at odds with scientific reality, and why this matters - is intriguing, Yoon never finds any momentum in her exposition. The first couple chapters begin promisingly enough, and the discussion of Linnaeus is charming and readable. However by the time I reached the midway mark and Yoon was still harping on about our "umwelt," her casual (bordering on the juvenile) style grew irritating. Contrary to being "impossible to put down," I had no desire to continue. Ashame, because I truly enjoy Yoon's NYTimes contributions and was looking forward to this book.

I read this book by mistake. The summary on the jacket flap led me to think that it was a book about taxonomy, but I should have been paying more attention. On the very first page Dr. Carol Kaesuk Yoon explains that she had intended to write a book about taxonomy, but then she had a revelation and decided not to. I missed this because I skipped to the good parts and started reading in the middle. So, strictly speaking, it is not Dr. Carol Kaesuk Yoon's fault that I thought the book fell short here and there, but I don't see that as any reason for not complaining anyway.

I read the book in a skippy fashion because Dr. Carol Kaesuk Yoon spent a good part of it discussing two ideas that were not new to me. The first: We all do taxonomy on some level. We see something in our back yard, we say to ourselves "What is that?" take a closer look and think "That is a very big bird." We have just done some taxonomy, we have classified a living creature, placing the thing in the back yard into the class of things that are birds, and not into the classes of things that are dogs, cats, groundhogs, rabbits etc. The second: One of the functions of the brain is to create what we perceive as reality out of the blip-blip electrochemical Morse code signals of the sensory nerves. Since we all have human brains, it is to be expected that the realities our brains create will have notable similarities. Since we are individuals, differences are to be expected. Dr. Carol Kaesuk Yoon refers to these constructed realities as the "umwelt," and points to a classifying or taxonomic function as an in-born or "instinctive" feature of the neural machinery that produces the umwelt.

Looking for good parts, I landed on the statement "Cladists declared that the group 'fish' did not exist," and stopped.

I was aware that even old-fashioned taxonomists were capable of abolishing taxa. During that period when Dr. Carol Kaesuk Yoon depicts them as moribund, taxonomists had erased a very large, prominent and commonly encountered phylum of animals, the coelenterates. One day the textbooks and nature guides had color illustrations of coelenterates, and the next day they were gone, coelenterates had become as fanciful as the unicorn and as dead as the dodo. The decision was not based on any new-fangled methods, but the old standby, comparative anatomy. These doddering old taxonomists then proved vigorous enough to ditch the entire ancient and honored Two Kingdom system, dumping a vast array of organisms out of the Plants, declaring that after a hundred years of the most serious investigation and thought they had concluded that a mushroom is not very much like a rosebush after all. Genuine scientific progress, for my money.

But I hadn't heard about the fish.

I searched fish taxonomy on [...], specifying journal sources, and the first hit was from the Sep 09 Journal of Proteomics, which sounds very scientific, and the taxonomist authors were unhesitatingly using the words "fish" and "taxonomy" in the same article, even though they probably would have died of embarrassment if they had been caught referring to "coelenterates."

Perhaps nobody was taking the "no fish" cladists seriously?

More web search: Cladistics is a method of doing taxonomy, the 1950 brainchild of a single East German, Willi Hennig. A little murk and mumbo jumbo can be eliminated by calling cladistics what it is, the "Hennig Method" or the "Willi Method." As described by Dr. Carol Kaesuk Yoon, one of the dictates of the Willi Method is that only groups that contain a common ancestor and ALL its descendents can be considered valid taxa. I could immediately see the problem with the fish. Some of the descendents of the ancestral fish are fish, but other descendents of the ancestral fish are great horned owls and Goldman Sachs account executives. But I could also see a major problem with the Willi Method - it is profoundly anti-evolutionary. Saying that only groups that contain a common ancestor and ALL its descendents can be considered valid taxa is the exact equivalent of saying "There is no evolution, that matters." To be a Willi Methodist is to insist that an organism cannot evolve, cannot change, cannot ever be validly classified as being something other than what its ancestor was.

How could Hennig ever have settled on such a dictum? Well, it turns out Hennig was an entomologist, and, I reasoned, while insects are in some ways marvels of evolution, as far as is known no insect has ever given rise to a line of organisms that are recognizably not insects. So Hennig's law might be useful in his own area, bugs, but not applicable to the whole, larger scheme.

Maybe that was why the boys at the Journal of Proteomics were still talking about fish? It appeared that the "clash" in Naming Nature's subtitle was actually a clash of scientific ideas.

Still, it seemed to me that the Willi Methodists must long since have produced counter-arguments to any objections I might raise. Well, lucky then that I was reading a book about taxonomy. Dr. Carol Kaesuk Yoon would recount the history of ideas in the science and elucidate the matter for me.

At that point, still at the "no fish" point in the book, I resumed reading, and of course I was due for a disappointment. I hadn't yet learned that Dr. Carol Kaesuk Yoon had a revelation and decided not to actually write a book about taxonomy after all, and recounting of the intellectual give-and-take that shaped the science would be reduced to "These obnoxious new guys said this, which really annoyed these other old fuddy guys, who replied 'Harrumph! Balderdash!"

Well, anyway, I read, and Dr. Carol Kaesuk Yoon went on to say that taxonomy was hot stuff in Linnaeus' day, but, as far as she could tell, by the middle of the 20th century taxonomists were viewed with scorn by all. Oh well, "science" is one of the things that human beings do, and "fashion" is another thing that human beings do, and if the Willi Methodists want to brag that they cannot tell a crow from a stegosaurus despite an evolutionary distance of more than 120 million years, and they want to run around ruining the lives of innocent little children by teaching them that birds are dinosaurs, there is still no law to prevent them from doing so.

(Excuse me for a moment while I pause to wonder why the early anatomists, from the days before open-admission colleges, looked at the bones of dinosaurs and decided that they were looking at big reptiles rather than big birds, and named the creatures accordingly).

Throughout the book Dr. Carol Kaesuk Yoon plays numerous variations on the theme "These scientists would reveal great new truths." She says the statements of the cladists were "The stark, naked truth." I have never seen a newspaper science story headlined "Scientists Reveal Great New Truths!" Such stories usually start off more like "After eighteen years spent studying caterpillars, a group of researchers at the University of Nebraska has concluded..." Dr. Carol Kaesuk Yoon is a science writer for the New York Times. Maybe at the Times her editor takes care of toning down her stuff. As she is a science PhD and the child of scientists you would think Dr. Yoon would be immune to the "stark naked truth" stuff, and aware that scientific pronouncements are conclusions that, while based on reproducible physical evidence, are drawn by fallible human minds and are, in principle, tentative. Ask a coelenterate, if you can find one, about the stark naked truth of scientific statements. One day in the textbooks and everything, and the next, Bam! Mass extinction.

At some points the evidence that Dr. Carol Kaesuk Yoon presents appears to contradict her own conclusions. She maintains that the natural taxonomy of the human umwelt is non-evolutionary, but describes folk taxonomies in which some animal forms are viewed as "father" to other forms, and there are groupings of disparate forms that are thought of as "brothers." It seems that the alert creationist must find the ungodly idea of the descent of varying forms from a common ancestor present even here, pre-Darwin and instinctively (given the book's assumption that folk taxonomies are more instinctive and less studied), built right into the very structure of the human brain.

Near the end of the book Dr. Carol Kaesuk Yoon gets around to spelling out what the book is actually about, "serious perversion of umwelt." For reasons of her own she did not go with "The Perverted Umwelt" as a title, but she maintains that our umwelts need de-tox.

Strangely, she cites the fact that publishing houses sell over a half million nature guides a year as evidence for her thesis that we are "disconnected from and disinterested in living things." The only reason I can think of for buying a nature guide is encountering some bird, some butterfly, some flower or tree or some furry critter, and asking "what is this marvelous thing, what are its ways?" and going in search of an answer. The buyers of nature guides seem to me to be acting human in the very way that Dr. Carol Kaesuk Yoon would wish them to, except for classifying whales as fish. And it occurs to me that some of the buyers of over a half million nature guides a year might be potential customers for a book about, oh, say, the history of ideas in the science of taxonomy. One that is not too difficult. Does anyone have any recommendations?

Yoon's basic contention is that scientific taxonomy should be viewed as one among many competing and equally valid approaches to understanding biodiversity. She is willing to (grudgingly) accept that the science of taxonomy is correct to arrive at various counter-intuitive conclusions (her favorite being that fish are not a natural group). However, she is attached to various aspects of intuitively obvious taxonomy and unwilling to let those go. Worse, she interprets this as a universal restriction on human understanding. She claims that our intuitive understanding of biodiversity is so ingrained and hard-wired that it simply is not possible for us to comprehend a world in which fish are not a natural, real group. Accepting scientific taxonomy leaves us, she says, divorced from any comprehension of the natural world. We just can't understand objective reality, so we shouldn't try and should insist that subjective intuition is just as good.

I don't buy it. Yoon gives us a world in which there ultimately is no reality. We're left with a morass of differing opinions, all "valid". Scientific taxonomy is left in a kind of limbo. She isn't quite willing to say we should just ditch it, but she's adamant that we not attach any greater importance to the results of painstaking empirical research than to those of a toddler looking out on the world of vertebrates for the first time. Science is allowed to exist in its own little domain, but not to help the rest of us comprehend the world. Yoon frequently professes that she is a scientist--really, she is!--but her view here is anti-scientific to the core. It's not that she disagrees with specific scientific methodologies or conclusions, but that she rejects science at the most fundamental level; she doesn't agree that there *is* an objective reality out there, that we can determine and comprehend it. If you think a whale is a fish, she says, go ahead! Don't let facts or, god forbid, taxonomists dissuade you.

So, that's my big gripe. Yoon gives us a world in which science is irrelevant, reality is incomprehensible, and we accept total taxonomic relativism. I also have a couple of smaller gripes. She abuses the word "umwelt" horribly, using it to refer specifically to our ability to intuit groupings of species. An organism's umwelt is simply its experienced world, in totality. There's nothing specifically taxonomic about it. Also, she seems to be unwilling to admit that our intuitive grasp of taxonomy (what Yoon calls our "umwelt") is incredibly flexible. We really aren't stuck with some set of intuitively obvious conclusions we can understand, and other counterintuitive conclusions we can't grasp; we can train our intuitions. We can *learn*.

Further, she beats us over the head with fish constantly, but never gets around to explaining what, exactly, the results of modern phylogenetic analyses *are*. Here's a very short version: Most of the things you're used to calling "fish" are indeed members of a real, natural group. Feel free to call members of that group "fish". If you want to be more precise, call them "ray-finned fishes" or "Actinopterygii". A few of the things you're used to calling "fish" aren't members of that natural group. Most of these critters are sharks or rays (or "Chondrichthyes"), a few of them are "lobe-finned fish" (coelocanths, lungfish), and a few of them are eel-like things without jaws (lampreys, hagfish). In Yoon's favorite example of the hopelessly counterintuitive, fundamentally incomprehensible results of cladism... it's really not that mind-bending. Go spend some time googling, test your own intuitive taxonomy. See if you can get a feel for why sharks and rays form a distinct group from trout, goldfish, tuna, gar, and the like. Take a look at how utterly bizarre lampreys and hagfish are. Try to improve your understanding, don't just take Yoon's word that it can't be done.

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.

In a tour through the history of classification, Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science, Carol Kaesuk Yoon shows an extraordinary talent for making what could be dull and scientific instead compelling and witty. She begins with a glimpse into her own life: she is the child and spouse of scientists, as well as a one herself. Yet her time as a science writer for the New York Times has brought humanity to her research and writing.

Yoon approaches her exploration of classification and taxonomy through the people most important to its development - Linnaeus, Darwin, and Hennig, as well as their followers (somewhat like taxonomical groupies). Through this approach, she is able to maintain a balance between storytelling and scientific facts while simultaneously chronicling the philosophical changes in taxonomy and its dependent culture.

Though the book reads much like a clever biography - the subjects being both the taxonomists and taxonomy itself - Yoon still asks important questions about the nature of how the brain classifies information and how driven we are to bring order to the world around us. (Taxonomy is everywhere! Pokémon, anyone?) She asks whether life can actually be organized in a meaningful way, or whether we are destined to continuously keep rearranging our umwelt. True, the taxonomists profiled here were most crucial in the development of methodology, moving it from evolutionary, to numerical, to molecular.

As Yoon explores what is essentially the history of the world through the lens of how we organize it, it's impossible not to appreciate the beauty of and humor in her writing. She manages to write rhythmic, lyrical sentences while being downright funny at times - all while [successfully] explaining what is Greek to most people. She sometimes gets caught up in a few too many metaphors, but it's worth it for the conversational narrative that makes understanding the development of classification so accessible. What she has accomplished - explaining the importance of both the scientific and theoretical milestones of classification - is a powerful example of page-turning science writing.

I really loved this book and recommend it highly. As an amateur naturalist who's always been interested in taxonomy, I think this is by far the best book I've ever read on the topic. It's never pedantic, and gently leads you through all the steps up to the latest and perhaps final stage in the process, cladistics. When the author first stated that there's no such thing as "fish," it was a bit shocking, but if you read to the end, it all makes sense. This subject could be deadly boring, but Carol Kaesuk Yoon makes it fascinating.