Monday, August 8, 2022

A short sentence from Linnaeus

 Linnaeus said: “There is no such thing as a new species.” 

Our conception of biology is barely imaginable without Linnaeus. Nevertheless that sentence is in my notebook. I turn to it as a reminder that even a genius can be confident about beliefs that are simply wrong. Or confident about concepts that turn out to be muddles.

at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Rilke’s two pens

 Ulrich Baer says that Rilke had two pens. One was for poetry and fiction. The other was for other business, such as paying bills and writin...

  • When Willa Cather's life began
     Willa Cather had a maxim: “Life began for me when I ceased to admire and began to remember.” She liked what the Greeks called  anamnesis , ...
  • Alice Oswald's poem on battle
     An appropriate read for Memorial Day? How about Alice Oswald’s long poem  Memorial , which recounts how soldiers in the  Iliad  met their e...
  • Lang: 'Letters to Dead Authors'
      Andrew Lang, a Scottish polymath who lived from 1844 to 1912, wrote   Letters to Dead Authors . I like the idea of the book, rather than t...