The Trouble with Classifying Nature
Part 1: On the origin of "species" as a concept, and its problems
I first drafted this piece last Thursday, but I’m not a fan of publishing underdone content, and something didn’t feel right about the argument then. After stepping away, I realized that listening to an episode if Past Present Future on the failings of taxonomy had tripped me into bugbear terrain, which muddied my initial post with long tangents. So, a week later, we’re coming back fresh to the concept with the first piece in a two-parter, to explore how our drive to catalogue the world sometimes hinders our fuller understanding of it, and ourselves.
Many thanks for your patience. I prefer to get work “right” than to beat the clock.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
This is a staggeringly easy question to answer—at least, for anyone who understands the theory of evolution—but the fact that it was presented so often in my childhood as if it were some great conundrum raised questions that I’ve wrestled with for years.
Obviously the egg came first, ejected by a creature close to what we’d call a chicken. In the egg, we have offspring with all the traits that would mark it as a chicken. The emergence of the egg itself is a much older trait in that animal’s older lineage.
But here are the deeper questions this answer yields:
Evolutionary change is not usually visible from one generation to the next, so would anyone really be able to differentiate between the parental near-chicken and its clearly-a-chicken offspring? Where’s the line? Who decides? And—
Why is the “chicken and egg” problem so hard for so many people to answer?
The answer to both questions comes from a concept that it took me years to process in full, even though I saw it playing out in real-time all around me:
Our scientific literacy is terrible.
Terrible.
Humans create classification systems. We name where one thing ends and another begins. And then we work ourselves into a tizzy over all this differentiation created by our words, our imperfect labels for the vast, messily fluid natural world.
In short, we confuse ourselves—and each other—by acting as if the name of a thing is the same as the thing itself.
And this causes problems for us in science and politics alike (to say nothing of how it affects our relationships, but we’re going to leave personal name-calling out of all our reflections on classification systems today).
Here’s a quick reminder for everyone, then, before paid subscribers and I deep-dive into some of the chewier consequences of our misdirected attention:
A “species” is a human designation, imposed in biology on procreating populations to differentiate between various groups alive in the world today, and across generational lines in deep time (think: tens of thousands to millions of years).
When you hear anyone talk about “missing links” in an evolutionary chain, they’re misguidedly thinking like the sort of people who would be puzzled by the chicken and egg problem: people, that is, who think that one day there’s no chicken, and then the next day—voila!—there’s a chicken. Just like that.
Meanwhile, each of us is simply the latest in a long, unbroken line of procreating lifeforms. Scientists look at the fossil record and study our genetics to piece together that long line of lifeforms, then highlight clusters of lifeforms with characteristics distinct from others on the time stream, and call them separate species.
But this scientific activity—this human activity, of putting words to natural processes—doesn’t negate the existence of transitional generations. All the fancy names we ascribe to different temporal clusters doesn’t erase the fact that there are also periods of time when when one cluster’s traits are gradually shifting into something else.
All that scientific activity, that naming of the long-term process by which one set of traits is succeeded by another, is just us, using our language to try to organize and make sense of the journey of life on Earth by marking its greatest highlights.
A long drive from Toronto to Vancouver, for instance, might have some exceptional stops along the way—the sort we’d surely celebrate in pictures and tales—but every kilometre put in, even across the least interesting terrain, still counts to get us there.
And when we forget that? When we act as though a trip through time and space can only be measured by the most memorable stops along the way? That’s when we risk forgetting the world as it is, in our relentless quest to set it to order as best we can.
In Part 1, we look at the muddled notion of a “species” in general, and its history. In Part 2, we’ll look at how this strange, shifting history affects our understanding of ourselves as a “species”. Thanks for supporting the work by reading along this far, if you have—and do give that aforementioned Past Present Future episode on the problem with taxonomy a listen, if you can’t join me in the journey below.
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