Joho the Blog
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July 05, 2005
Stephen Jay Gould's The Lying Stones of Marakech not only has an eye-opening, perfectly constructed chapter on Lamarck, he also writes compellingly about George-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1708-1788), known to most of us simply as Buffon, the guy who is one "o" away from being a clown. According to Gould, Buffon's 44-volume Natural History proposed an alternative to Linnaeus' system. Linnaeus (1707-1778) arranged species into clusters based primarily on the look of their sex organs. Within those clusters, species were ranked from simplest to most complex, and the clusters were themselves ranked, so it all formed a Great Chain of Being. Buffon, on the other hand, presented a more hyperlinked system (as he would certainly not have said): Bats are more like mammals in their anatomy but more like birds in their function. Since he he had to pick one and only one way of clustering the species -- pages are bound into books in one and only one sequence -- he did it not by finding one unique (essential) feature but by looking at their ability to interbreed. Linnaeus' system outlasted Buffon's because Linnaeus' "nested and hierarchical scheme...could be slotted into a genealogical interpretation — the arborescent tree of life....the the discovery of evolution woiuld soon impose upon any formal system of naming." (p. 80) So, Linnaeus' system prevailed because its structure worked for a theory of evolution that was a hundred years away, although the actual divisions were made based on morphological relationships orthogonal (well, almost) to evolution. Buffon's system didn't prevail because, although he got the nature of relationship much closer to evolution's (species = what can interbreed), it didn't have the tree-like structure evolution requires. Yet, Buffon's multi-faceted system would work better than Linnaeus' in the age of digital information since it would allow scientists to sort and organize for multiple purposes using multiple criteria. (Ranganathan was the Buffon of library science.) Posted
by D. Weinberger at July 5, 2005 12:14 PM
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Comments
Until today my knowledge of Buffon was limited to his eponymous needle, a mathematical oddity he investigated (presumably between volumes 40 and 41). Buffon's Needle is an early example of probabilistic geometry, aka Monte Carlo methods, in which any long thin object, dropped randomly onto a regularly lined surface such as an American flag or gym floor, can be used to calculate pi.
I like to freak out my middle-school science students by throwing a box of toothpicks and having them count up the mess. But it's a crowd pleaser at any party.
One might see in Buffon's needle noodlings the kind of "prescience in retrospect" that you're impuging to his webby taxonomy. Not many 18th-century thinkers dabbled in non-deterministic techniques -- standard operating procedure today for analyzing anything from quarks to comets.
Posted by: Gordon Benett | July 5, 2005 02:42 PM
I have one old volume of Buffons great Natural History. It is in danish translation. I like to freak out my friends and family by quoting from the entry on Sea Mermaids.
The content of Buffons Natural History, and especially the way it discusses certain issues is very educating to someone trained in a modern academical way of arguing.
Actually I believe that you could argue that Buffon (as probably others of his time) are more in line with the dialogue on blogs, and does not much resemble modern academic discourse.
To take that idea one step further: Are we (some of us) so fed up with the blown up posturing and jargon of recent generations of academics (read: academics in the humanities) that we are creating a whole new ecosystem of knowledge exchange and cultivation on the internet - aka the blogosphere?
Just a small idea.
Tree structures are "good" - not just because we are used to them (or hardwired to see them?) - but also because they invite a certain kind of argument regarding the correct placement of a species. If there's only one "rigth" place to put a species, then you have the "propellant" of a good academical argument - which in turn can spark a good number of published articles - which is what will advance your academical career.
So Linneaus is good for your career, and maybe Buffon is not as good?
Just another small idea.
Posted by: Gunnar Langemark | July 6, 2005 01:46 AM
Gunnar:
Are we (some of us) so fed up with the blown up posturing and jargon of recent generations of academics (read: academics in the humanities) that we are creating a whole new ecosystem of knowledge exchange and cultivation on the internet - aka the blogosphere?
Well, yes and no. Yes, that is what we're doing, but no, it's not a 'whole new' thing (or rather, it's not a whole new kind of thing). All communities live on talk - and all talk produces knowledge, of some sort. (More on this, with links, here.)
If there's only one "right" place to put a species, then you have the "propellant" of a good academical argument - which in turn can spark a good number of published articles - which is what will advance your academical career.
Trees produce clouds, in other words...
Posted by: Phil | July 6, 2005 07:19 AM
Gunnar, thanks for those big "small" ideas.
Phil, I have the same "Well, yes and no" response to your post as you have to Gunnar's. No, it's not a whole new thing, but nothing is. Yes, we've been talking forever. That's been the constant undercurrent of humanity. (I wonder in what ways it hasn't been constant, though. Surely conversational discourse must have its own history.) But if Gunnar is right, the power relationships built over that current of talk are changing.
There is an empirical element to this question: Are universities hiring/tenuring more people with fewer publications?
Posted by: David Weinberger | July 6, 2005 08:31 AM