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The aristocratic French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon chose a good year to die: 1788. Reflecting his status as a star of the Enlightenment and author of 35 popular volumes on natural history, Buffon’s funeral carriage drawn by 14 horses was watched by an estimated 20,000 mourners as it processed through Paris. A grateful Louis XVI had earlier erected a statue of a heroic Buffon in the Jardin du Roi, over which the naturalist had masterfully presided. “All nature bows to his genius,” the inscription read. The next year the French Revolution erupted. As a symbol of the ancien regime, Buffon was denounced as an enemy of progress, his estates in Burgundy seized, and his son, known as the Buffonet, guillotined. In further insult to his memory, zealous revolutionaries marched through the king’s gardens (nowadays known as the Jardin des Plantes) with a bust of Buffon’s great rival, Carl Linnaeus. They hailed the Swedish scientific revolutionary as a true man of the people. The intense intellectual rivalry between Buffon and Linnaeus, which still resonates today, is fascinatingly told by the author Jason Roberts in his book Every Living Thing, my holiday reading while staying near Buffon’s birthplace in Burgundy. Natural history, like all history, might be written by the victors, as Roberts argues. And for a long time, Linnaeus’s highly influential, but flawed, views held sway. But the book makes a sympathetic case for the further rehabilitation of the much-maligned Buffon. The two men were, as Roberts writes, exact contemporaries and polar opposites. While Linnaeus obsessed about classifying all biological species into neat categories with fixed attributes and Latin names (Homo sapiens, for example), Buffon emphasised the vast diversity and constantly changing nature of every living thing. In Roberts’s telling, Linnaeus emerges as a brilliant but ruthless dogmatist, who ignored inconvenient facts that did not fit his theories and gave birth to racial pseudoscience. But it was Buffon’s painstaking investigations and acceptance of complexity that helped inspire the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin, who later acknowledged that the Frenchman’s ideas were “laughably like mine”. Engravings of anatomical parts of an apus (triops) cranciformis in one of the 35 popular volumes on natural history written by Buffon © De Agostini/Getty Images In two aspects, at least, this 18th-century scientific clash rhymes with our times. The first is to show how intellectual knowledge can often be a source of financial gain. The discovery of crops and commodities in other parts of the world and the development of new methods of cultivation had a huge impact on the economy in that era. “All that is useful to man originates from these natural objects,” Linnaeus wrote. “In one word, it is the foundation of every industry.” Great wealth was generated from trade in sugar, potatoes, coffee, tea and cochineal while Linnaeus himself explored ways of cultivating pineapples, strawberries and freshwater pearls. “In many ways, the discipline of natural history in the 18th century was roughly analogous to technology today: a means of disrupting old markets, creating new ones, and generating fortunes in the process,” Roberts writes. As a former software engineer at Apple and a West Coast resident, Roberts knows the tech industry. Then as now, the addition of fresh inputs into the economy — whether natural commodities back then or digital data today — can lead to astonishing progress, benefiting millions. But it can also lead to exploitation. As Roberts tells me in a telephone interview, it was the scaling up of the sugar industry in the West Indies that led to the slave trade. “Sometimes we think we are inventing the future when we are retrofitting the past,” he says. The second resonance with today is the danger of believing we know more than we do. Roberts compares Buffon’s state of “curious unknowing” to the concept of “negative capability” described by the English poet John Keats. In a letter written in 1817, Keats argued that we should resist the temptation to explain away things we do not properly understand and accept “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Armed today with instant access to information and smart machines, the temptation is to ascribe a rational order to everything, as Linnaeus did. But scientific progress depends on a humble acceptance of relative ignorance and a relentless study of the fabric of reality. The spooky nature of quantum mechanics would have blown Linnaeus’s mind. If Buffon still teaches us anything, it is to study the peculiarity of things as they are, not as we might wish them to be.
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