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The aristocratic French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, chose a good year to die: 1788. Buffon’s hearse, drawn by 14 horses, was followed by an estimated 20,000 mourners as it passed through Paris, reflecting his status as a star of the Enlightenment and author of 35 popular volumes of natural history. A grateful Louis XVI had previously commissioned a statue of the heroic Buffon to be erected in the Jardin du Roi, which the naturalist had masterfully presided over. “All nature bows before his genius,” read the inscription.
The next year, the French Revolution broke out. As a symbol of the Old RegimeBuffon was denounced as an enemy of progress, his estates in Burgundy were confiscated and his son, known as Buffonet, was guillotined. As a further insult to his memory, zealous revolutionaries paraded through the King’s Gardens (now the Jardin des Plantes) with a bust of Buffon’s great rival, Carl Linnaeus, praising 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 described by author Jason Roberts in his book Every living being, my holiday reading while staying near Buffon’s birthplace in Burgundy. Natural History, like all history, may have been written by the victors, argues Roberts. And for a long time Linnaeus’ influential but flawed views prevailed. But the book makes a sympathetic case for the continued rehabilitation of the much-maligned Buffon.
The two men were, as Roberts writes, exact contemporaries and complete opposites. While Linnaeus was obsessed with dividing all biological species into clear categories with fixed attributes and Latin names (Homo sapiens, Buffon, for example, emphasized the enormous diversity and constantly changing nature of all living things.
In Roberts’s account, Linnaeus emerges as a brilliant but ruthless dogmatist who ignored inconvenient facts that did not fit his theories, giving birth to racial pseudoscience. But it was Buffon’s careful research and his acknowledgement of complexity that inspired his theories of evolution in Charles Darwin, who later admitted that the Frenchman’s ideas were “ridiculously similar to mine.”
This 18th-century scientific conflict is compatible with our times in at least two ways. First, it shows how intellectual knowledge can often be a source of financial gain. The discovery of crops and raw materials in other parts of the world and the development of new methods of cultivation had an enormous impact on the economy of the time. “Everything that is useful to man comes from these natural objects,” wrote Linnaeus. “In a word, it is the basis of all industry.”
Great wealth was created through trade in sugar, potatoes, coffee, tea and cochineal, while Linnaeus himself explored ways to cultivate 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 wealth in the process,” Roberts writes. As a former software engineer at Apple and a West Coast resident, Roberts knows the technology industry well.
Then as now, the introduction of new inputs into the economy – whether natural resources then or digital data today – can lead to amazing progress that benefits millions. But it can also lead to exploitation. As Roberts tells me in a phone interview, it was the expansion 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 the present is the danger of believing we know more than we actually do. Roberts compares Buffon’s state of “curious ignorance” to the concept of “negative capability” described by the English poet John Keats. In a letter from 1817, Keats argued that we should resist the temptation to explain away things we do not properly understand and “accept uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without petulantly searching for facts and reasons.”
With instant access to information and intelligent machines, it is tempting to ascribe a rational order to everything, as Linnaeus did. But scientific progress depends on humbly accepting one’s relative ignorance and tirelessly studying the fabric of reality. The uncanny nature of quantum mechanics would have stunned Linnaeus. If Buffon teaches us anything else, it is to study the nature of things as they are, not as we wish they were.
