How Zoologists Organize Things

The Art of Classification

David Bainbridge

• Publisher: Frances Lincoln
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780711252271
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Zoology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Humankind's fascination with the animal kingdom began as a matter of survival – differentiating the edible from the toxic, the ferocious from the tractable. Since then, our compulsion to catalogue wildlife has played a key role in growing our understanding of the planet and ourselves, inspiring religious beliefs and evolving scientific theories. The book unveils wild truths and even wilder myths about animals, as perpetuated by zoologists – revealing how much more there is to learn, and unlearn. Long before Darwin, our ancestors were obsessed with the visual similarities and differences between the animals. Early scientists could sense there was an order that unified all life and formulated a variety of schemes to help illustrate this. This human quest to classify living beings has left us with a rich artistic legacy, from the folklore and religiosity of the ancient and Medieval world through the naturalistic cataloging of the Enlightenment to the modern, computer-generated classificatory labyrinth. This book tells the fascinating, visual story of this process. The wonderful zoological charts reflect prevailing artistic trends and scientific discoveries, as well as telling us as much about ourselves as they do about the creatures depicted.

CHAPTER 1

Aristotle, Bestiaries & Cynocephali

Joannes Jonstonus (1603–1675), Historiae Naturalis de Quadrupedibus Libri, 1657; Sunfish and rays.

An ABC of Early Classification

(Antiquity–1700)

And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him.

Genesis, Chapter II, XIX–XX

The oldest Western traditions of naming and classifying animals arose from the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and zoological organization certainly has a prominent place in the Scriptures. Adam was created on the same day as the beasts of the Earth – a surprising nod to the modern concept of ‘man as an animal’ – and one of the very first tasks assigned to him was to name those beasts. Indeed, it is notable that God only decided to create Eve because his non-human creations were not up to the task of accompanying and helping Adam.

Anonymous, Aberdeen Bestiary, c.1200; God creates the animals.

Charles Singer (1876–1960), A Short History of Biology, 1931; Aristotle’s Scala Naturae.

This biblical trope of animal classification continues later in, and is perhaps partly explained by, detailed proscriptions against eating certain animals. Leviticus, Chapter XI contains what we would now call ‘decision trees’ relating to the eating of animals with cloven hooves, that chew the cud, or that have fins and scales. It is possible that these rules derived from earlier trial-and-error experiments with different foodstuffs, which led, presumably, to some disastrous microbiological or parasitic consequences, and these rules survive in modern Jewish customs. The reader cannot help feeling that many of these arcane injunctions must have had a practical life-or-death rationale, and indeed practical considerations have often driven our need to classify animals. After all we, by definition, are the descendants of people who knew which beasts were ferocious or toxic.

The other ancestral strand of Western zoological classification is the ancient Greeks, whose writings seem to spring from an enlightened inquisitiveness rather than a crude need to survive. Indeed, at first sight, their approach appears surprisingly modern. Much of early Greek animal biology is summarized in Aristotle’s fourth-century BC Natural Philosophy, although it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish Aristotle’s own discoveries from those of his often-uncredited sources.

Aristotle lived and wrote on Lesbos, one of the largest islands in the Aegean Sea, and his descriptions of the island’s fauna, especially those that inhabited its warm, shallow lagoons, form the basis of much of the Natural Philosophy. Aristotle continually emphasized that his writings were based on observation of nature itself and not a repetition of the errors of his predecessors, and to some extent this is true. For each ζῷον (‘zoön’ means ‘animal’, hence ‘zoology’) he encountered, he analyzed particular traits he thought could be used to determine its affinities with other creatures. He realized that some features are common to all animals, and also that colour, shape and size are unreliable classificatory criteria. As a result, he recommended organizing animals according to the following categories: their food, habitat and behaviour, how they breathe, whether they metamorphose, whether they are social or solitary, nocturnal or diurnal, tame or wild, offensive or defensive, whether they lay eggs or bear live young, whether they are anchored to the seabed or swim, wal...