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Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science
PDF Ebook Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science
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Review
“A beautiful riddle of a book.†- Time Out New York“Impossible to put down.†- Booklist“Starred Review: Superb.†- Kirkus Reviews“A sensuous delight to read.†- O, The Oprah Magazine“Starred Review: Optimistic, exhilarating, and revolutionary.†- Publishers Weekly“Bracing and brilliant.†- Boston Globe“Ingenious . . . compelling.†- San Francisco Chronicle
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From the Back Cover
Advance praise for Naming Nature: "Original, delightful, and wise. . . . Yoon descends from the best writers of popular science, Stephen Jay Gould and Brian Greene among them."-Sue Halpern, author of Four Wings and a Prayer: Caught in the Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly "Naming Nature will be enjoyed by every biologist, birder, and general nature lover."-Paul R. Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies, Stanford University, and author of The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment "Naming Nature is rich with prickly characters, from Linnaeus to Ernst Mayr to Willi Hennig, who animate the fascinating story of how science has learned to find a deep orderliness within life's diversity."-David Quammen, author of The Reluctant Mr. Darwin "To name is to know is to be able to love, and that is biodiversity's last best hope: Such is the thesis of this compelling, quirky, beautifully written guide."-David Takacs, author of Philosophies of Paradise: The Idea of Biodiversity "A fascinating history of science, an illumination of nature's improbable exuberance, and a thoughtful evaluation of occasional conflict between man-made definitions and living reality."-Deborah Blum, author of Monkey Wars "Optimistic, exhilarating and revolutionary."-Publishers Weekly, starred review
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Product details
Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (August 2, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0393338711
ISBN-13: 978-0393338713
Product Dimensions:
5.5 x 0.9 x 8.3 inches
Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
3.6 out of 5 stars
22 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#630,373 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Although the premise of the book - our instinctual categorization of the world is at odds with scientific reality, and why this matters - is intriguing, Yoon never finds any momentum in her exposition. The first couple chapters begin promisingly enough, and the discussion of Linnaeus is charming and readable. However by the time I reached the midway mark and Yoon was still harping on about our "umwelt," her casual (bordering on the juvenile) style grew irritating. Contrary to being "impossible to put down," I had no desire to continue. Ashame, because I truly enjoy Yoon's NYTimes contributions and was looking forward to this book.
Great insight into the human psyche, and had times that made me laugh out loud. HIGHLY recommend if you are interested in understanding human nature, how we learn and what we are losing with our focus on material goods.
Fascinating stuff, but a bit seemed like it could have been edited better to tighten the whole thing up.
Like another reviewer, I read the piece in the NY Times and enjoyed it enough that I pre-ordered the Kindle edition of this book. I'm very glad I did. As a records and information manager I have experience with a different kind of taxonomy - ordering documents in ways that allow the right information to be found by the right person at the right time - but there are enough similarities to the struggles in ordering and naming living things that I could feel kinship with the various players discussed in this book. The writing style the author uses is elegant and clear. Themes and phrases are repeated multiple times and help each new segment build upon the one before it. What could have been annoying repetition was instead a kind of binder that held all the little pieces of the narrative together from start to finish. I can highly recommend this book to others as just a good read or as a history of how things are named. I enjoyed it for both.
Really loved this book! I am in the Horticulture field, butnot an academic, and an amateur in the area of taxonomy. It heldmy interest, was quite informative and well written.
Our natural affinity for living things is transferred to brands and logos as we become more disconnected from nature itself. Argues for personal bonds with natural things, guided by our instincts.Provides a history of taxonomy from Linnaeus to Phylocodes. Appropriates the term 'umwelt' to describe the way we perceive nature through our senses.
To set the record straight at the start, I am a taxonomist, as well as an ecologist. My specialty is in spiders, of which I've described and named 14 species. I also have some interest in microscopic organisms, especially diatoms. I am quite aware of the problems associated with defining species and also aware that taxonomy is difficult to explain to the layman, and even to some biologists. The world is not organized for our convenience, but it is, I think, of use to at least try to understand what is meant by kingdom, phylum, class, order, species, and populations, even if we decide that some categories are a bit on the fuzzy side. After all evolution has not stopped (even for humans) and thus many species and even higher classifications may seem a bit blurry.It is with this background (and probable biases) that I examined Carol Kaesuk Yoon's new book "Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science." I was impressed by the many positive reviews that were listed and saw even more on the book website, including at least one scientist I know. Unfortunately in reading the first part of the book I quickly became uneasy. She has invoked the ethological term "umwelt" to define the natural instinct to name things and believes that the re-reinstatement of "instinctive" classifications for organisms (which make whales fish and cassowaries mammals) would make people appreciate nature more. While I think I see her point, I tend to also think, like Quentin Wheeler in another on-line review of the book, that her suggestion does not really solve the problem. In the early 19th Century a U.S. court ruled that for commercial and tax purposes a whale was a fish. Do we not find it easier to kill a fish than a mammal? Is it possible that using "umwelt" principles animal life would become less valuable? Re-instating misconceptions because species and other taxonomic categories are difficult is, in my mind, not the answer. I am quite happy for local peoples to call their local organisms what they want to call them, but scientific concepts of taxonomy, even if changing radically at times, are important not only to the scientists (as Yoon recognizes), but to our whole species as well. I feel very uneasy about her approach and wonder if she will be upset when a whaler takes one of those dumb "fish."As to her discussion of taxonomy and systematics, I have to admit that like her I was at first a bit put off by cladists, but I have come to think (even noting the difficulties involved in defining shared derived characteristics and the turmoil caused by the results of DNA analysis) cladistics is by far the best game in town. To be fair Yoon does note the utility of the science and resulting phylogenetic trees, but worries that scientists, by not embracing the "umwelt" classifications, are cutting themselves off from a public that simply does not care about such esoteric things. She instead invokes gut feelings. Because of my own personal history I tend to mistrust uninformed gut feelings because I have seen how they can lead one astray. I don't discount them totally, but I prefer to use gut feelings when I have informed myself as much as possible. We do not live in a nice neat perfectly ordered world, but I am suspicious of any philosophy that throws what we do know, even if it is very little, to the wind in favor of a dumbing down.There are, of course, other ways of classifying organisms. We could classify them by ecological association and place horned larks and prairie dogs together, a sort of "spruce-moose" biome classification. We could classify organisms by their edibility (as many native peoples did for obvious reasons) or by whether they were venomous or poisonous, or useful for folk medicine. I doubt that any scientist would be too disturbed by these alternate classifications, as long as it was noted that they did not reflect genetic relatedness.Yoon is right that we need to continue to explore and describe new species (alpha taxonomy), no matter how well we can actually do this. It is possible that I am not correctly understanding her arguments, but some of her ideas are pretty jarring. Her suggestion that an early French classification of snakes, crocodiles and slugs as insects should be taken as a valid concept strikes me as not an example of native "umwelt" but of a really quirky way of interpreting nature. I felt very disturbed upon reading her final paragraph when she describes an orca jumping as "the biggest, blackest, most fantastic fish I'd ever seen under a gorgeous blue sky." I have seen orcas myself in the San Juan Islands and I will wager that their being mammals awed me at least as much as her seeing them as fish!
This is one of the most annoying books I have ever read. The author worked as a research scientist before going into journalism, but throughout the book I felt I was in the company of a non-scientifically trained journalist who had stumbled onto an idea for a book that might raise enough controversy to sell. The vast majority of people, even in countries with high standards of public education, know next to nothing about taxonomy, or naming nature as the book's title has it, and would be totally unaware, and not very interested in finding out, that what we call 'fish' are not an homogenous group in an evolutionary sense. It is my bet that modern taxonomy has had no influence whatsoever on the disconnect that so many people have between their lives and the natural world. The biodiversity crisis is not a result of people's confusion over taxonomy, which is what the author suggests, it is a result of the ever-increasing drive for resources which underpins our economies, our increasing populations and our lifestyles. The lack of rigour shown throughout the book was for me a major source of irritation. A reader lacking taxonomic knowledge would find it confusing, a reader with taxonomic knowledge would find it frustrating.
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