Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Fascinating stuff. I wish I'd known about them when I was living in London!

Lovely piece, and great photos.

I find it wonderfully appropriate that the modern version of the Linnaean taxonomy still struggles to reflect true Darwinian descent due to (ultimately incorrect) naming decisions made in the past. These imperfections survive because the naming rules do not allow them to be changed (see Stephen Jay Gould's essay/book 'Bully For Brontosaurus').

There is an analogy here with the retention of imperfect design features in species, which are 'too ingrained' for evolution to have got rid of (yet) - leg bones in whales, and stuff like that. It is these imperfections that, to me at least, best prove that species have evolved. Evolution has design constraints; omnipotent creators do not.

Call me perverse, but I get a big kick out of imperfections like these: they tell us a lot about how we got where we are. Long live imperfect metadata and imperfect design!

All that history and we're still back to a basic card sorting routine at the core.

Thanks for the tour! However, I'm not convinced that paper or even the limitations of the physical world are the only elements that have led us towards hierarchy rather than faceted classifications or free tagging. For one thing, hierarchy affords a simpler (though less accurate) way of understanding the world. Do you really believe there are no cognitive or biological or cultural dimensions to the way we organize and think? It would be interesting to redesign a kindergarten curriculum based on the theory that everything is miscellaneous...anyway, thanks for mixing things up and putting some fun back into taxonomy :-)

"Knowledge thus derives its nature from the paper that expresses it" Yup, the medium is the message, alright. It's the effects of the medium that help shape our interactions with it.

Hierarchies date from the time of a primary oral society, the artefacts of which we retain in the earliest writings of Western society, those of Plato and Aristotle (among others).

This raises significantly interesting questions about how electric technologies and their messages (i.e. effects) shape our interactions with the knowledge we are creating today. The big problem with answering this question is that we have a great deal of difficulty in actually observing the true messages, since we are still influenced by the obsolescent (i.e. non-dominant relative to influencing society) book.

David, this aspect may be your biggest challenge in the work you are about to create (congrats on the book, deal, btw!). That is, pulling yourself away from the ground effects of Gutenberg (of which we are all a product by virtue of our 17th century based educational system).

Thanks for the fascinating tour!

Peter, 100% agreement. I didn't mean to say that paper is the only factor. I'm enough of a McLuhanite to think that media affect the frameworks of thought, but I would not want to slight, for example, brain structure, linguistic rules, economic factors, Aristotle, the vagaries of history, etc. It's just that at the Linnean Society, the archivist didn't put on white gloves to lay any of those out on the table. She laid out paper. It was thrilling.

Mark, obviously I agree that the medium affects the content of thought. But a theme of my book will be the ways in which physical reality, and not any one medium, affect how we organize. E.g., hierarchical thinking derives in part from the fact that when we sort real world objects into piles, we have to put them into one pile but not another (which Aristotle captured as the Law of Identity - the physical driving the metaphysical). Obviously, the nature of the physical isn't a sufficient explanation since all cultures exist in the real world but not all cultures think hierarchically (I think). So, while I do find deep insights in McLuhan's thought, I'm not willing to give up on all the other factors that shape thought - I'm enough of a Marxist to think economics shouldn't be slighted, enough of a Wittgensteinian to regard language as important, etc. - nor to think of all those factors as media.

Two brief comments on your comment:

1) Considering "all those factors" as media (at least for a little while) provides you with a useful construct of McLuhan vocabulary (I'm thinking late McLuhan here) that enables interesting comparisons among things that normally aren't directly comparable. But then again, that's sort of my gig, so it's a "hammers and nails" thing for me... But useful nonetheless.

2) Aristotle didn't know quantum mechanics. Things CAN be in two places at once, so to speak. The weirdness of contemporary physics suggests an interestingly weird construction of contemporary metaphysics. Whereas all of your miscellany works in the Aristotelian physical model (F=mv), and a Newtonian physical model (F=ma), there may be opportunity for a different sort of conception based on an Einsteinian (and post-Einsteinian) physical model (F=who the heck knows?)

Great post (love your ah-hah! moment re: paper) and subsequent comments. I especially appreciate Richard's "perversity" -- and I share it enthusiastically.

Citing Phipps' Law (paraphrased: the advance of technology always moves faster than human trust), points to another limiting factor -- human resistance to change and/or preference for "control" or stability, solid ground (yeah, I'm in California).

Example: A research institution, at which I once worked, wished to redesign its website interface and took on the "taxonomy" problem. UI experts determined that card-sorting was the best measure of a "proper" taxonomy; so they subjected our brilliant researchers to a "taxing" index-card exercise, testing about 10 users -- since "all the research" and certain prominent UI experts say that's what works.

These UI consultants refused to consider, exemplified by their test-method, that one object could be in two or more stacks. But those assumptions backfired a bit... When you collect too many PhDs in one place, this sort of thing happens alot. Though research forms the heart of this institution, researchers only account for about 10 percent of the total personnel. Of those researchers selected, being mostly physicists, their brilliant minds could think of so many alternatives, justifications, and mind-f__k opportunities; being a relatively small minority of an already small sample, their aberrations were dismissed as anomalies. BTW, most of them honorably resisted the mind-f__k temptations, and simply surrendered to yet another bureaucratic waste of time: Give them what they want, and get it over with ASAP.

Dr.D, there's also some interesting research on the shape -- literally, graphically, of different linguistic composition styles. Check UC Berkeley dissertations, if you're interested, or email me for specifics.

Thanks for this post. I don't travel as much as I'd like and I'm (probably excessively) suspicious of the worship of relics (both religious and scientific), so you've given me a chance to see something enlightening that I probably wouldn't have seen myself.

Let me add my thanks to David Weinberger for his delightful tour of the Linnean Society with his wonderful photos and evocative descriptions. David mentioned the invertebrate category of Vermes, calling it a sort of miscellaneous category. In a sense he is correct; Vermes included a multitude of diverse invertebrate species. The story of its taxonomic expansion demonstrates that the very process of categorization leads to new knowledge.

The original Linnaean taxonomy lists groups of animals in a linear structure from most complex (Mammals) to least complex (Vermes or Worms). For example, birds are defined as more complex than fish. Linnaeus divided invertebrates into two categories of insects and worms. Insects also included crustaceans and spiders. Worms included everything else, including mollusks.

The French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was a mollusk specialist and he knew the difference between a shellfish and a worm. He coined the word invertebrate, along with the word biology. Lamarck eventually added eight new invertebrate categories, listed in the traditional linear structure of presumed complexity.

However when he started working with actual worms, he realized the problems with linearity. He had two kinds of worms – earthworms and tapeworms. Earthworms are highly complex and tapeworms are pretty simple. How could he logically fit them into one place in his linear structure?

He couldn’t and this categorization problem led him to the understanding that life is not linear. A bird is not necessarily more or less complex than a fish. His solution was to develop the branching approach to taxonomy. This is a fundamental change in our understanding of life and it was discovered because Lamarck was trying to classify invertebrates. He was working out a structure that would accurately map the relationships of different groups of animals. Lamarck’s response to this classification puzzle was a major scientific discovery about the nature of life.

Like Richard Carter, I enjoy reading Stephen Jay Gould. There’s more about Lamarck and taxonomy in Gould’s essay, “A Tree Grows in Paris: Lamarck’s Division of Worms and Revision of Nature,” in his book, “The Lying Stones of Marrakech.” Gould studied some original writings and realized the magnitude of Lamarck’s contribution to biology. If you think Lamarck is just about giraffes stretching their necks, take a look at Gould’s essay.

Um - "the money, goods, or estate that a woman brings to her husband in marriage" is spelled dowry (webster.com). A dower is "the part of or interest in the real estate of a deceased husband given by law to his widow during her life" (op. cit.).

This being the age of irony, maybe it makes sense that David, who on occasion rues the need to travel, should be a hell of a good travel writer.

Why is Carl linnaeus' work still so useful 2day?