Naming Nature

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette, and here’s a book I am really excited to recommend. It’s about the history of scientific taxonomy, about how we classify and define the living world. The book is called Naming Nature, The Clash Between Instinct and Science. And it’s by Carol Kasich Yoon, who has written extensively about science for the New York Times. It’s incredibly engaging and gorgeously written.

And one of the words that I learned from this book is the word umwelt. That’s U-M-W-E-L-T. Umwelt. It’s a German word that literally means the world around. And it was coined in the early 1900s by a Baltic German biologist who wanted a word for the world as it’s perceived by various animals according to their sensory abilities and their cognitive powers.

So, for example, a honeybee with its compound eyes is going to have a very different umwelt from, say, the umwelt of a dog, which understands so much of the world through smell. And we humans have our own umwelt, of course. And the human umwelt, that way of perceiving the environment, is the basis of the work of Carl Linnaeus. Now, of course, he was the Swedish botanist and so-called father of modern taxonomy, and he categorized things by what he could see and touch. You know, these flowers have five petals, and this animal is very similar to that animal.

But here’s the thing. Advances in evolutionary and molecular biology have shown how Linnaeus’s system was limited by his own umwelt, because when you start analyzing things at the genetic level, it gets a whole lot more complicated. And let me give you an example. A lungfish has either one or two lungs, depending on the species, and they can survive out of water for months or, if necessary, years. And if you sort creatures by their evolutionary closeness, what you find is that a cow and a lungfish are more closely related to each other than a lungfish is to a salmon. That is, they share a more recent common ancestor.

And if you look at them anatomically speaking, a lungfish and a cow both have lungs. A salmon does not. A cow has an epiglottis, so does a lungfish. A salmon does not, and a lungfish’s heart looks more like a cow’s heart than it looks like a salmon’s heart. So what exactly is a fish? And that’s the kind of question raised by this book. It’s this rich, chewy book about how we try to make sense of things by giving them names. And it’s about how we divide up and impose some kind of order on the world or try to, which of course is what we do with language.

So I really think you’d dig this book. I would love to read the book. Does she talk about that human instinct to categorize how we want to sort and divide and list and put things into their boxes and charts and graphs and maps? And there’s something fundamental about that for us, isn’t there?

So fundamental. In fact, there is some research that suggests that there may even be a part of the brain that governs this kind of thing. She cites some really interesting research about people with brain injuries who have a hard time recognizing one or the other, like they can recognize inanimate objects, but they cannot for the life of them recognize things that are alive. There are people who can say, oh, that’s a flashlight or oh, that’s a canoe. But if they see a kangaroo or a flower, they’re clueless. They just can’t identify it.

And so there’s some thought that maybe, you know, this is something instinctive. And then you also look at little kids, you know, when they go through that dinosaur phase. A lot of times they aren’t making up stories about the dinosaurs. They’re categorizing them. They’re naming them. They’re all about the names and the different characteristics of those dinosaurs. So don’t get me started. Just read the book. It’s such cool stuff, and it’s pretty mind-blowing.

So that book, again, is Naming Nature, The Clash Between Instinct and Science by Carol Kasich Yoon.

Thank you, Martha. We’re always interested in what you’re reading. No matter where you are in the world, there’s a way to contact us. Go to our website, waywordradio.org/contact.