Great scientists
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Carl Linnaeus
The Swedish scientist, Carl Linnaeus (1707–78), is famous for devising the two-part naming system, known as binomial nomenclature, used to classify all living things. A chimpanzee's name under the Linnaean classification system, for example, is Pan troglodytes; a weeping willow is Salix babylonica. Linnaeus has been described as the father of taxonomy, the science of grouping living things together on the basis of their shared characteristics. He is also responsible for describing and classifying the human species exactly in the same way as he classified other animals, at a time when it was generally thought that humans should be regarded as a special case—quite different from animals.
Early life
Carl Linnaeus was born in 1707, the eldest of five children, in the village of Råshult, Småland, in southern Sweden. His father, Nils, was a church minister and keen gardener. He was eager to teach his son about plants and their various names. By the age of five, Carl had his own garden, and he set about memorizing as many plant names—then, as now, in Latin—as he could.
Carl rarely studied at school, preferring to go to the countryside to look for plants. His headmaster, Daniel Lannerus, was interested in botany and introduced him to Johan Rothman (1684–1763), the state doctor of Småland. Rothman helped Carl develop an interest in medicine.
University
In 1728, after spending a year studying medicine at the University of Lund, Carl Linnaeus moved to Uppsala University, where he studied the use of plants in medicine. There he met Olof Celsius (1670–1756) the uncle of Anders Celsius, the inventor of the Celsius temperature scale. Celsius, also a botanist, offered him a place to live while at university and allowed him to use his library. During this time, Linnaeus wrote an essay on the classification of plants and another professor at the university, Olof Rudbeck (1660-1740), was so impressed that he suggested Linnaeus should become a lecturer in botany.
Travels
From 1732 to 1735, Linnaeus travelled around Sweden, especially Lapland in the far north, making observations of the native plants and birds. He used the new two-part naming system he had devised at Uppsala University to describe the plants—and now animals as well—he came across.
Linnaeus moved to the Netherlands in 1735, where finished his medical degree at the University of Harderwijk. He published the first edition of his classification of living things, called the Systema Naturae. During these years, he travelled to Germany, France and England, and started to correspond with Europe's great botanists.
Linnaean taxonomy
Linnaeus developed a system of scientific classification now widely used in biology. The system grouped different organisms into hierarchies. At the top were the kingdoms, e.g. the animal kingdom. Kingdoms were divided into classes (e.g. mammals, fish, birds etc.) and they, in turn, into orders (so mammals were divided into carnivores, primates, ungulates etc.).
Orders were then divided into genera (the plural of genus, e.g. Felis for cats, Canis for dogs, Giraffa for giraffes), which were divided into species, e.g. Giraffa camelopardalis, the only living species of giraffe. Below species, in some cases, he divided species into what we now call varieties (in plants) or subspecies (in animals).
In modern taxonomy, the rank of family, between order and genus, and the rank of phylum, between kingdom and class, have been added since Linnaeus's day.
Linnaeus's groupings were based upon similarities. By looking at shared physical characteristics, such as teeth or shape of wings, Linnaeus could decide whether different animals were related. In so doing, Linnaeus created order out of the seemingly chaotic world of nature, thus making it much easier to study.
Binomial system
Before Linnaeus, many scientists gave the species they described long Latin names; these could vary from scientist to scientist. For example, the briar rose was referred to as Rosa sylvestris inodora seu canina, or as Rosa sylvestris alba cum rubore, folio glabro.
Linnaeus decided to give every organism one Latin name to indicate the genus, and one as for the species. These made up a two-part, or binomial, species name. Thus the briar rose was named by Linnaeus as Rosa canina. This binomial system rapidly became the standard system for naming all species.
Classification of humans
Linnaeus classified the human species exactly in the same way as he classified other animals. He was the first person to place humans in the primate group, including monkeys and apes, calling them Anthropomorpha, which means "manlike". This was not because he believed there was any kind of evolutionary link (evolution had not been thought of atg the time). He did so in the same way as he categorized all life forms: identifying similarities (for example, forward-facing eyes, no tails, well-developed fingers and toes with nails instead of claws) between the species.
Linnaeus originally named humans as Homo diurnis, or "man of the day". Humans are now classified as Homo sapiens: "wise man".
Publications
Linnaeus named over 12,000 species of plants and animals—although some have since had to be renamed as scientists have discovered more about them. Linnaeus published his work in a number of books, including the two most famous: Systema naturae and Species plantarum (1753). The information they contain is still used by scientists today.
Over the years, Linnaeus continued to add new species. Systema Naturae thus expanded from 12 pages in its first edition (1735) to 2400 pages in its multi-volume 12th edition (1766–68).
Later life
Linnaeus returned to Sweden from the Netherlands where, after marrying Sara Lisa Moraea, he became a professor of botany at Uppsala University in 1741. In 1747, he was appointed chief royal physician; he was knighted in 1758, taking the name Carl von Linné. Linnaeus suffered from illness towards the end of his career. He died on 10th January 1778.
Consultant: Mike Goldsmith