On Naming Nature

The Scientist very recently published an informed, moderate and brief review of "Naming Nature - The Clash Between Instinct and Science." Since the book has been approved by Oprah, the New York Times and Scientific American, I expect it to become something of a topic of discussion. As it happens, I also read the book and also wrote a (sort of) review, intending to post on Amazon.com. I haven't gotten around to that yet, but expect to do so. Since my "review" is just a response to the book produced by a reader who has never taken a course in systematics, I thought I would put it before the more knowledgeble audience of The Scientist before subjecting the general public to it, expecting that both I and the general public will benefit. Comment, criticism, correction, suggestion, explanation and enlightenment all greatly appreciated. Outright condemnation must be supported by reasoned argument:

Naming Nature - The Clash Between Instinct and Science
Carol Kaesuk Yoon

I read this book by mistake. The summary on the jacket flap led me to think that it was a book about taxonomy, but I should have been paying more attention. On the very first page Dr. Carol Kaesuk Yoon explains that she had intended to write a book about taxonomy, but then she had a revelation and decided not to. I missed this because I skipped to the good parts and started reading in the middle. So, strictly speaking, it is not Dr. Carol Kaesuk Yoon's fault that I thought the book fell short here and there, but I don't see that as any reason for not complaining anyway.

I read the book in a skippy fashion because Dr. Carol Kaesuk Yoon spent a good part of it discussing two ideas that were not news to me. The first: We all do taxonomy on some level. We see something in our back yard, we say to ourselves "What is that?" take a closer look and think "That is a very big bird." We have just done some taxonomy, we have classified a living creature, placing the thing in the back yard into the class of things that are birds, and not into the classes of things that are dogs, cats, groundhogs, rabbits etc. The second: One of the functions of the brain is to create what we perceive as reality out of the blip-blip electrochemical Morse code of the sensory nerves. Since we have all have human brains, it is to be expected that the realities our brains create will have notable similarities. Since we are individuals, differences are to be expected. Dr. Carol Kaesuk Yoon refers to the constructed realities as the "umwelt," and points to a classifying or taxonomic function as an in-born or "instinctive" feature of the neural machinery that produces the umwelt.

Looking for good parts, I landed on the statement "Cladists declared that the group 'fish' did not exist," and stopped.

I was aware that even old-fashioned taxonomists were capable of abolishing taxa. During that period when Dr. Carol Kaesuk Yoon depicts them as moribund, taxonomist had erased a very large, prominent and commonly encountered phylum of animals, the coelenterates. One day the textbooks and nature guides had color illustrations of coelenterates, and they next day they were gone, coelenterates had become as fanciful as the unicorn and as dead as the dodo. The decision was not based on any new-fangled methods, but the old standby, comparative anatomy. The doddering old fossil taxonomists then proved vigorous enough to ditch the entire ancient and honored Two Kingdom system, dumping a vast array of organisms out of the Plants, declaring that after a hundred years of the most serious investigation and thought they had concluded that a mushroom is not very much like a rosebush after all, when you get right down to it. Genuine scientific progress, for my money.

But I hadn't heard about the fish.

I searched fish taxonomy on www.scirus.com, specifying journal sources, and the first hit was from the Sep 09 Journal of Proteomics, which sounds very scientific, and the taxonomist authors were unhesitatingly using the words "fish" and "taxonomy" in the same article, even though they probably would have died of embarrassment if they had been caught referring to "coelenterates."

Perhaps nobody was taking the "no fish" cladists seriously?

More web search: Cladistics is a method of doing taxonomy, the 1950 brainchild of a single East German, Willi Hennig. A little murk and mumbo jumbo can be eliminated by calling cladistics what it is, the "Hennig Method" or the "Willi Method." As described by Dr. Carol Kaesuk Yoon, one of the dictates of the Willi Method is that only groups that contain a common ancestor and ALL its descendents can be considered valid taxa. I could immediately see the problem with the fish. Some of the descendents of the ancestral fish are fish, but other descendents of the ancestral fish are great horned owls and Goldman Sachs account executives. But I could also see a major problem with the Willi Method - it is profoundly anti-evolutionary. Saying that only groups that contain a common ancestor and ALL its descendents can be considered valid taxa is the exact equivalent of saying "There is no evolution, that matters." To be a Willi Methodist is to insist that an organism cannot evolve, cannot change, cannot ever be validly classified as being something other than what its ancestor was.

How could Hennig ever have settled on such a dictum? Well, it turns out Hennig was an entomologist, and, I reasoned, while insects are in some ways marvels of evolution, as far as is known no insect has ever given rise to a line of organisms that are recognizably not insects. So Hennig's law might be useful in his own area, bugs, but not applicable to the whole, larger scheme.

Maybe that was why the boys at the Journal of Proteomics were still talking about fish?

Still, it seemed to me that the Willi Methodists must long since have produced counter-arguments to any objections I might raise. Well, lucky then that I was reading a book about taxonomy. Dr. Carol Kaesuk Yoon would recount the intellectual give-and-take, elucidate the matter for me, and correct my misperceptions.

At that point, still at the "no fish" point in the book, I resumed reading, and of course I was due for a disappointment. I hadn't yet learned that Dr. Carol Kaesuk Yoon had a revelation and decided not to actually write a book about taxonomy after all, and recounting of the intellectual give-and-take that shaped the science would be reduced to "These obnoxious new guys said this, which really annoyed these other old fuddy guys, who replied 'Harrumph! Balderdash!"

Well, anyway, I read, and Dr. Carol Kaesuk Yoon went on to say that taxonomy was hot stuff in Linnaeus' day, but, as far as she could tell, by the middle of the 20th century taxonomists were viewed with scorn by all. If so, what of it? "Science" is one of the things that human beings do, and "Fashion" in another thing that human beings do. If the Willi Methodists want to brag that they cannot tell a crow from a stegosaurus despite an evolutionary distance on the order of 120 million years, and they want to run around ruining the lives of innocent little children by teaching them that birds are dinosaurs, there is no law to prevent them from doing so.

(Excuse me for a moment while I pause to wonder why the early anatomists, from the days before open-admission colleges, looked at the bones of dinosaurs and decided that they were looking at big reptiles rather than big birds, and named the creatures accordingly).

Throughout the book Dr. Carol Kaesuk Yoon plays numerous variations on the theme "These scientists would reveal great new truths." She says the statements of the cladists were "The stark, naked truth." I have never seen a newspaper science story headlined "Scientists Reveal Great New Truths!" Such stories usually start off more like "After eighteen years spent studying caterpillars, a group of researchers at the University of Nebraska has concluded..." Dr. Carol Kaesuk Yoon is a science writer for the New York Times. Maybe at the Times her editor takes care of toning down her stuff. As she is a science PhD and the child of scientists you would think she would be immune to the "stark naked truth" stuff, aware that scientific pronouncements are conclusions that, while based reproducible physical evidence, are drawn by fallible human minds and are, in principle, tentative. Ask a coelenterate, if you can find one, about the stark naked truth of scientific statements. One day in the textbooks and everything, and the next, Bam! mass extinction.

At some points the evidence that Dr. Carol Kaesuk Yoon presents appears to contradict her own conclusions. She maintains that the natural taxonomy of the human umwelt is non-evolutionary, but describes folk taxonomies in which some animal forms are viewed as "father" to other forms, and there are groupings of disparate forms that are thought of as "brothers." It seems that the alert creationist must find the ungodly idea of the descent of varying forms from a common ancestor present even here, pre-Darwin and instinctively (given the book's assumption that folk taxonomies are more instinctive and less studied), built right into the very structure of the human brain.

Near the end of the book Dr. Carol Kaesuk Yoon gets around to spelling out what the book is actually about, "serious perversion of umwelt." For reasons of her own she did not go with "The Perverted Umwelt" as a title, but she maintains that our umwelts need de-tox.

Strangely, she cites the fact that publishing houses sell over a half million nature guides a year as evidence for her thesis that we are "disconnected from and disinterested in living things." The only reason I can think of for buying a nature guide is encountering some bird, some butterfly, some flower or tree or some furry critter, and asking "what is this marvelous thing, what are its ways?" and going in search of an answer. The buyers of nature guides seem to me to be acting human in the very way that Dr. Carol Kaesuk Yoon would wish them to, except for classifying whales as fish. And it occurs to me that some of the buyers of over a half million nature guides a year might be potential customers for a book about, oh, say, the history of ideas in the science of taxonomy. One that is not too difficult. Does anyone have any recommendations?