Despite the field of taxonomy's now blatant modernity, with practitioners using DNA sequences, sophisticated evolutionary theory and supercomputers to order and name all of life, jobs for taxonomists continue to be in steady decline. The natural history collections crucial to the work are tossed9.
Outside taxonomy, no one is much up in arms about this, but perhaps we should be, because the ordering and naming of life is no esoteric science. The past few decades have seen a stream of studies that show that sorting and naming the natural world is a universal, deep-seated and fundamental human activity, one we cannot afford to lose because it is essential to understanding the living world, and our place in it.
Anthropologists were the first to recognize that taxonomy might be more than the science officially founded by Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist, in the 1700s2. Studying how nonscientists order and name life, creating what are called folk taxonomies, anthropologists began to realize that when people across the globe were creating ordered groups and giving names to what lived around them, they followed highly stereotyped patterns, appearing unconsciously to follow a set of unwritten rules. Not that conformity to rules was at first obvious to anthropologists who were instead understandably dazzled by the variety in folk taxonomies. The Ilongots, for example, a people of the Philippines, name gorgeous wild orchids after human body parts. There bloom the thighs, there fingernails, yonder elbows and thumbs. The Rofaifo people of New Guinea classify the cassowary, a giant bird complete with requisite feathers and beak, as a mammal. In fact, there seemed, at first glance, to be little room even for agreement among people, let alone a set of universally followed rules. More recently, however, deep underlying similarities have begun to become apparent.
Cecil Brown, an anthropologist who has studied folk taxonomies in 188 languages, has found that people recognize the same basic categories repeatedly, including fish, birds, snakes, mammals, "wugs" (meaning worms and insects)5, trees, vines, herbs and bushes.
Dr. Brown's finding would be considerably less interesting if these categories were clear-cut depictions of reality that must inevitably be recognized. But tree and bush are hardly that, since there is no way to define a tree versus a bush. The two categories grade insensibly into one another. Wugs, likewise, are neither an evolutionarily nor ecologically nor otherwise cohesive group. Still, people repeatedly recognize and name these oddities.
Likewise, people consistently use two-word epithets to designate specific organisms within a larger group of organisms; despite there being an infinitude of potentially more logical methods6. It is so familiar that it is hard to notice. In English, among the oaks, we distinguish the pin oak, among bears, grizzly bears. When Mayan Indians, familiar with the wild piglike creature known as peccaries, encountered Spaniards' pigs, they dubbed them "village peccaries." We use two-part names for ourselves as well: Sally Smith or Li Wen. Even scientists are bound by this practice, insisting on Latin binomials for species.
There appears to be such a profound unconscious agreement that people will even concur on which exact words make the best names for particular organisms. Brent Berlin, an ethnobiologist at the University of Georgia, discovered this when he read 50 pairs of names, each consisting of one bird and one fish name, to a group of 100 undergraduates, and asked them to identify which was which. The names had been randomly chosen from the language of Peru's Huambisa people, to which the students had had no previous exposure10. With such a large sample size—there were 5,000 choices being made—the students should have scored 50 percent or very close to it if they were blindly guessing. Instead, they identified the bird and fish names correctly 58 percent of the time, significantly more often than expected for random guessing. Somehow they were often able to intuit the names' birdiness or fishiness.
Some researchers hypothesize that there might be a specific part of the brain that is devoted to the doing of taxonomy. Without the power to order and name life, a person simply does not know how to live in the world, how to understand it. How to tell the carrot from the cat—which to grate and which to pet? To order and name life is to have a sense of the world around, and, as a result, what one's place is in it.13478