Every Living Thing
The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life
By Jason Roberts
Category: Science | Reading Duration: 18 min | Rating: 4.7/5 (33 ratings)
About the Book
Every Living Thing (2024) explores the bitter rivalry between Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis de Buffon to catalog every living thing, a competition that gave birth to modern biological science while also planting the seeds of scientific racism. It reveals how historical accidents and political forces ensured that the wrong man’s ideas triumphed, leaving us with Linnaeus’s rigid classification system even though Buffon was right about evolution, extinction, and the interconnected nature of life.
Who Should Read This?
- Science fans who enjoy discovering how scientific knowledge developed through human rivalry and error
- History buffs who appreciate colorful characters and surprising connections to modern issues
- Anyone curious about how political forces shape the scientific ideas that survive
What’s in it for me? Discover the brilliant and twisted legacy of the first race to name every living thing.
Imagine believing that you could identify and classify every species that exists. Every beetle in every forest, every fish in every ocean, every flower on every mountainside. Two men in the 1730s actually believed they could do this. They thought the world contained about ten thousand species at most.
They were both spectacularly wrong. Carl Linnaeus in Uppsala, Sweden and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in Paris, France became rivals in this quest to catalog all of creation. And you know their work even if you don’t know their names. When you call humans, Homo sapiens, you are using the classification system Linnaeus invented.
When you understand manmade climate change, or that species can go extinct, you’re actually seeing consequences that Buffon predicted 250 years ago. The circumstances of their deaths would elevate one of them to fame, and bury the other in obscurity. And the wrong ideas would flourish for centuries for all the wrong reasons. This Blink tells the story of how two men trying to organize life on Earth ended up defining what it means to be human, and how the accidents of history gave us the worst of one, and lost the best of the other.
Chapter 1: A grand vision
In Europe in the 1730s, nature was an incomprehensible chaos. No one knew how many types of creatures existed, and no one agreed on what to call them. A rose might have twelve different names in twelve different towns. A sparrow in Spain had nothing in common with a sparrow in Sweden, at least not on paper.
Into this confusion stepped two men with the same impossible dream. They would bring order to the natural world. They would find, name, and organize every living thing on Earth. Carl Linnaeus was just twenty-three when he first imagined his grand system. The son of a Swedish pastor, he had the confidence of someone who believed God had chosen him for this task. From his position at Uppsala University, he declared that nature contained exactly three kingdoms: animal, vegetable, and mineral.
Everything that existed would fit into neat categories, like nested boxes. Seven levels of classification would be enough to organize all of creation. He even gave himself a grand title to match his ambition: Prince of Botanists. In contrast, Georges-Louis Leclerc, later the Comte de Buffon, could not have been more different. Where Linnaeus craved fame and collected titles, Buffon worked quietly from his estate in Burgundy. Where Linnaeus saw fixed categories designed by God, Buffon saw nature as flowing and changing.
He was wealthy enough to ignore fashion and powerful enough to ignore critics. As director of the Royal Garden in Paris, he commanded resources Linnaeus could only dream about. Yet he signed his letters simply “Buffon” and avoided the Academy meetings where men fought for reputation. Their methods reflected their personalities. Linnaeus built his system of natural classification like a military campaign, sending students he called apostles to die in jungles and deserts around the world collecting specimens for him to examine. He measured skulls and counted flower petals, reducing nature to numbers and abstract labels.
Buffon wrote gorgeous prose about animals as living beings with histories and habits. He studied how creatures behaved, what they ate, how they mated. Where Linnaeus wanted to name ten thousand species quickly, Buffon wanted to understand each one deeply. Both men believed the world was small enough, and nature simple enough, to be cataloged completely. And both believed they would finish the job in their lifetimes. But the rivalry between them would prove that nature was far stranger, far richer, and far more dangerous to classify than either of them imagined.
Chapter 2: The rivalry
By 1749, the race to discover, classify, and name every living thing on earth had become personal. Linnaeus published the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae, now swollen to over a thousand pages. Every creature in it received two Latin names, a genus and species, simple as a first and last name. His students fanned out across the globe, dying in remarkable numbers but sending back specimens from places Europeans had never imagined.
Meanwhile in Paris, Buffon launched his Histoire Naturelle, which would eventually fill forty-four volumes with half a million pages. Where Linnaeus gave nature a filing system, Buffon gave it a complex story and history. But the differences went far deeper than style. Linnaeus insisted that species were fixed since creation, as unchanging as time itself. Each type of creature had always existed exactly as it appeared today. God had made them perfect from the beginning.
His system assumed nature was a divine library where nothing was ever added or removed. Count up all the species, arrange them properly, and you would behold the mind of God. Buffon saw things radically differently from the neatness of Genesis. Animals changed over time. The Earth itself was ancient beyond imagination, perhaps seventy-five thousand years old, not the six thousand years the Church asserted. Species could disappear forever, a concept so disturbing that most scholars refused to even consider it.
He noticed that animals in the Americas were smaller than their counterparts in the Old World and wondered if the environment shaped creatures across generations. These ideas danced dangerously close to heresy, but became prophetic in light of later theories by Charles Darwin. Their classification systems reveal much about their underlying philosophies. Linnaeus grouped humans with monkeys as primates, a shocking move that outraged theologians. Yet he also divided humanity into categories, or “races,” that would poison science for centuries. Buffon refused to slice humanity into types, arguing that all people formed one species with endless variety.
But he classified animals according to their usefulness to humans, placing the horse first because it served us best. While each showed incredible scientific foresight in some areas, both men made classifications that seem absurd today. Linnaeus included dragons and phoenixes in early editions, classifying mythical beasts alongside real ones. He also classified minerals and diseases as if they were living things. Buffon declared that New World animals were degenerate versions of Old World creatures, that America itself was a lesser continent. They agreed on almost nothing – with the notable exception that nature would soon yield up all its secrets.
Chapter 3: The madness of the method
The systematic thinking that both men championed led them into some spectacular scientific dead ends. Take the straightforward case of dogs and wolves. Linnaeus classified them as entirely separate species, unable to see that every poodle and mastiff descended from wolves. He created three different species for what we now know as one African elephant.
Young animals sent by his students were frequently categorized as distinct species from their own parents. The system that promised perfect order actually added more confusion. Buffon’s observational, big-picture style produced just as many perplexing mistakes. He declared that big cats could not cross the equator, that lions existed only in the Old World. When confronted with evidence of jaguars in South America, he insisted they must be degenerate lions, weakened by the inferior climate. He believed the tropics were too hot for large animals to thrive, somehow overlooking elephants in India and hippos in Africa.
His theory that environment shaped animals fused with his European prejudices to produce a toxic idea: every creature in the Western hemisphere was a lesser version of a superior European original. Linnaeus and Buffon had their greatest difficulties when applying their systems to the variety of human life. Linnaeus created four varieties of Homo sapiens based on the four known continents. Europeans were gentle, inventive, and governed by laws. Asians were melancholic and governed by opinion. Native Americans were choleric and governed by custom.
Africans were indolent and governed by whim. He even added a fifth category for people he could not explain: wild men, monstrous humans, and what he termed defective births. With this, science became a tool for prejudice, and these categories would soon justify horrors that neither man could have imagined. The damage went beyond classification. These early systems created rules that nature refused to follow. Linnaeus insisted that all plants reproduced sexually, then could not explain mushrooms or ferns.
He declared that swallows hibernated underwater because he could not imagine tiny birds flying to Africa. Buffon calculated that Earth needed exactly 74,832 years to cool from molten rock to its current temperature – a remarkably exact number that was completely wrong. Modern genetics reveals just how far both men missed the mark. What they classified as independent species often turned out to be the same animal at different life stages.
What they thought were separate types were more often just variations within a single species. Their neat categorization has dissolved under modern DNA analysis. Yet we still use their language, still think in their terms, still struggle to escape the boxes they built around nature. And some of those boxes became cages, trapping entire peoples in categories designed by men who never met them, creating a scientific vocabulary for oppression that would outlive both rivals by centuries.
Chapter 4: The massive mistakes
The systems created to organize the natural world were soon used as models for organizing people. By the late 1800s, colonial administrators carried Linnaeus’s racial categories like field guides as they carved up parts of Africa and Asia. British officials in India created elaborate classifications of castes and tribes, declaring some naturally criminal, others naturally servile. French colonizers in Africa sorted peoples into those capable of civilization and those condemned to permanent inferiority.
The language of natural science gave empire the vocabulary of control. These ideas metastasized in ways that would have horrified even Linnaeus. German scientists in the 1930s built entire academic departments around racial classification, measuring skulls and noses with the same precision Linnaeus had counted flower petals. They created charts showing pure types and mixed types, superior varieties and inferior ones. The culmination of this thinking was genocide, justified by the scientific language of “species management” and “racial hygiene. ” The categories originally designed for beetles and birds had become twisted into death sentences for millions.
Meanwhile, Buffon’s belief in environmental degeneration transformed into equally poisonous theories. American slaveholders argued that Africans thrived in bondage because tropical climates had made them naturally suited for hard labor under supervision. European colonizers insisted that indigenous peoples needed foreign rule because their environments had stunted their development. Even well-meaning reformers spoke of lifting inferior races toward European standards, never questioning the hierarchy itself. The natural world fought back against these rigid categories. Scientists discovered that cooperation, not competition, drives most ecosystems.
Trees in forests share nutrients through underground fungal networks. Predator and prey maintain delicate balances that benefit both. What appeared to be a ladder of importance was actually a network of mutual dependence. Species they had classified as separate turned out to be the same organism at different stages, or partners in relationships so intimate that neither could survive alone. In the twentieth century, genetics demolished the biological basis for racial classification entirely. There are no pure types, no superior varieties, no scientific basis for the hierarchies that have caused immense suffering.
Nature operates like a web, not a ladder. Every strand connects to every other strand. Cut one and the whole structure trembles. The great mistake was not just getting the facts wrong, but imagining that life could be ranked at all.
Chapter 5: The reckoning
When Linnaeus died in 1778, only a handful of mourners were there to see him laid to rest in Uppsala Cathedral. His household servants attended, as well as a few former University colleagues who remembered him from his younger days. Years of strokes had left him unable to recognize his own writings, forgotten even before death. Yet his system was already spreading across Europe like seeds on the wind.
When Buffon died ten years later, in 1788, forty thousand people followed his coffin’s slow procession through Paris. By the time of his death, he was arguably the most famous scientist in Europe, his Natural History outsold every book except the Bible in his time. Yet within just months, revolutionary chaos would erase him from living memory. The French Revolution targeted Buffon’s legacy with a particular viciousness. His son, who inherited his papers and specimens, went to the guillotine in 1794. Revolutionary mobs ransacked the Royal Garden that Buffon had directed for half a century.
His precious collections were scattered, his manuscripts burned, and his name purged from the institution he had built. The new Republic wanted no trace of aristocratic science. Meanwhile in London, a young naturalist and botanist, Joseph Banks, was purchasing Linnaeus’s entire collection – specimens and all. Banks went on to make a name for himself in numerous scientific expeditions, including James Cook’s first voyage. This secured Linnaeus’ taxonomy system of binomial nomenclature at the heart of British natural history just as Britain was building its empire. Several students also carried on the rivalry that their teachers had started.
Georges Cuvier, following Linnaeus, insisted that species were fixed and that catastrophic floods explained fossils. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, inspired by Buffon, argued that creatures transformed over time. Their battle raged through Parisian academies for decades. In England, young Charles Darwin read both Linnaeus and Buffon carefully, finding in Buffon’s buried hints about change over time the seeds of natural selection. But he built his theory using Linnaeus’s classification system as scaffolding. History chose sides based on politics, not science.
British and German empires needed Linnaeus’s fixed categories to justify colonial rule. His racial classifications became gospel in expanding nations hungry for scientific reasons to dominate others. Buffon’s fluid, changing nature threatened the very idea of permanent hierarchy. His warnings about environmental damage and resource depletion sounded too much like revolution. By 1850, every schoolchild learned Linnaean taxonomy, while Buffon gathered dust in libraries. Today we know Buffon was right about the big questions and Linnaeus was wrong.
Species do change. Extinction is real. Humans are warming the planet. Nature flows rather than fixes.
Yet we still use Linnaean taxonomy because empires spread it so effectively that it became impossible to replace. Every field guide and textbook bears his mark. The wrong man won because his mistakes were more useful to power than his rival’s truths.
Final summary
The main takeaway of this Blink to Every Living Thing by Jason Roberts is that in their race to name every living thing, Carl Linnaeus and Le Comte de Buffon gave us both the vocabulary of modern biology and the pseudoscience of racial classification. Political circumstances determined the winner of their rivalry when the French Revolution erased Buffon’s revolutionary ideas – while the British Empire spread Linnaeus’s useful mistakes across the globe. The tragic result was that wrong ideas flourished for wrong reasons, turning natural science into a blueprint for human oppression that culminated in genocide. Modern genetics proves what Buffon suspected all along – that nature operates through cooperation and change, not fixed hierarchies.
The great lesson of their rivalry is that science never exists in isolation from power, and the stories we tell about nature inevitably become stories we tell about ourselves. Okay, that’s it for this Blink. We hope you enjoyed it. If you can, please take the time to leave us a rating – we always appreciate your feedback. See you in the next Blink.
About the Author
Jason Roberts won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for Every Living Thing. His first book, A Sense of the World, chronicling the blind adventurer James Holman, became a national bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Based in Northern California, he regularly writes for publications like McSweeney’s and The Believer.