Stephen Jay Gould’s The Lying Stones of Marakech not only has an eye-opening, perfectly constructed chapter on Lamarck, he also writes compellingly about George-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1708-1788), known to most of us simply as Buffon, the guy who is one “o” away from being a clown.

According to Gould, Buffon’s 44-volume Natural History proposed an alternative to Linnaeus’ system. Linnaeus (1707-1778) arranged species into clusters based primarily on the look of their sex organs. Within those clusters, species were ranked from simplest to most complex, and the clusters were themselves ranked, so it all formed a Great Chain of Being. Buffon, on the other hand, presented a more hyperlinked system (as he would certainly not have said): Bats are more like mammals in their anatomy but more like birds in their function. Since he he had to pick one and only one way of clustering the species — pages are bound into books in one and only one sequence — he did it not by finding one unique (essential) feature but by looking at their ability to interbreed.

Linnaeus’ system outlasted Buffon’s because Linnaeus’ “nested and hierarchical scheme…could be slotted into a genealogical interpretation — the arborescent tree of life….the the discovery of evolution woiuld soon impose upon any formal system of naming.” (p. 80)

So, Linnaeus’ system prevailed because its structure worked for a theory of evolution that was a hundred years away, although the actual divisions were made based on morphological relationships orthogonal (well, almost) to evolution. Buffon’s system didn’t prevail because, although he got the nature of relationship much closer to evolution’s (species = what can interbreed), it didn’t have the tree-like structure evolution requires.

Yet, Buffon’s multi-faceted system would work better than Linnaeus’ in the age of digital information since it would allow scientists to sort and organize for multiple purposes using multiple criteria. (Ranganathan was the Buffon of library science.)

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