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Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science Reprint Edition

3.9 out of 5 stars 22 customer reviews
ISBN-13: 978-0393338713
ISBN-10: 0393338711
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Product Details

  • Paperback: 352 pages
  • Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (August 2, 2010)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0393338711
  • ISBN-13: 978-0393338713
  • Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.9 x 8.3 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #659,247 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

Format: Hardcover
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?
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Format: Paperback
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.
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Format: Hardcover
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
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Format: Hardcover
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.
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