Book Review: Every Living Thing

Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life tells the stories of the lives of Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus and his French contemporary Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, both born in 1707.  

Linnaeus and Buffon each brought brilliant new insights to the fledgling fields of natural history and taxonomy in the eighteenth century. However, they approached natural history from very different perspectives. As they grew older and each became known and respected in Europe, they freely published insults and condescending statements about each other's work and ideas.

Historical events beyond the control of any scholar ended up giving Linnaeus a lot more name recognition, but today's scientific understanding of botany, zoology, taxonomy, and biology in general derives from the works of these two perceptive naturalists.

Today we know Linnaeus mostly for his thorough classification of all organisms known to him into a hierarchical scheme ranging from the largest category of kingdom down to the narrower concept of species. He is also known for developing the universally recognized system of binomial nomenclature.

In this biography, it becomes clear that Linnaeus strongly believed that there are a limited number of species on Earth and that species do not ever change or evolve. His "sexual system" of classifying plants is still the basis for much of traditional plant taxonomy, but it is certainly being supported, refuted, and sometimes displaced by modern DNA analyses that clearly show that species DO change and are related to each other in distinguishable ways.

Buffon's name is not nearly as well known today as Linnaeus's. Buffon was a brilliant student of natural history, and he recognized the ability of species to change and proliferate more than a century before Charles Darwin's famous publications.

Anti-Buffon sentiments date back to the French Revolution of 1789, a year after his death. As director of the Jardin du Roi for forty years, his name was entwined with that of the French king, and the Revolutionaries demanded destruction of any vestige of royal powers.

Fortunately, the garden was saved, and its name changed to Jardin des Plantes. But it is Linnaeus who was lionized as the great sage of natural history.

Jason Roberts does not end this fascinating story with the deaths of its two heroes. He goes on to explore the legacies of Linnaeus and Buffon in the expansion of biological and taxonomical sciences. 

Great biologists like Michel Adanson, Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Georges Cuvier, Joseph Banks, Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, Gregor Mendel, Louis Agassiz, and Julian Huxley are all described as scientific descendants of the two eighteenth century protagonists of this book. 

Author: Jason Roberts

ISBN-13: 9781984855220

Publisher: Random House USA

Publication date: 2025

Pages: 432

Review by — Fayla Schwartz, Washington Native Plant Society