Every Living Thing

Roberts pairs Linnaeus and Buffon as opposites who pursued the same goal, cataloguing all life on Earth, and lets their conflicting methods and worldviews carry the book's real argument: that the history of taxonomy is inseparable from the biases of the people doing the classifying. He doesn't let Linnaeus off the hook for the racial pseudoscience embedded in his classification system, pushing back explicitly against later defenders who've tried to separate the man's scientific legacy from his racism. Buffon, by contrast, emerges as the more prescient and humane figure, someone who anticipated evolutionary thinking and warned about climate change well before either was fashionable, yet lost the naming battle to Linnaeus's tidier system. The book's tension between two rival intellectual legacies gives shape to what could otherwise be a diffuse survey of Enlightenment science.