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  • Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science by Carol Kaesuk Yoon book cover
  • Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science by Carol Kaesuk Yoon book cover
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Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science

by Carol Kaesuk Yoon

How we name the living world

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Awards & Recognition

  • Award recognition

    Finalist for the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science and Technology

    Finalist for the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science and Technology.

  • Critical praise

    Praised by the New York Times Book Review as “A lively blend of popular scientific history and cultural criticism”

    Described as “A lively blend of popular scientific history and cultural criticism.”

AlbakiReads Editorial

How we name the living world

Carol Kaesuk Yoon examines a tension at the heart of taxonomy: the effort to classify life scientifically, and the human instinct to recognize and sort living things by appearance. The account reaches back to eighteenth-century naturalist Carl Linnaeus, whose work confronted the problem of defining species in a world where forms change. It then traces taxonomy’s shift toward laboratory methods and results that can challenge intuitive categories. Yoon argues that this growing distance between ordinary ways of seeing nature and scientific classification has helped alienate people from the natural world. The book connects the history of a scientific discipline with broader questions about how humans make sense of life’s diversity.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in the history and ideas of taxonomy and evolutionary biology
  • Readers curious about how scientific classification relates to everyday ways of seeing nature

Themes

Taxonomy and species classificationEvolution and changeHuman perception of the natural world

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

Biologist Carol Kaesuk Yoon explores the historical tension between evolutionary biology and taxonomy. Carl Linnaeus struggled in the eighteenth century to define species in light of their mutability while still relying on intuitive, visual judgments. As taxonomy modernized, it moved into labs, yielding results counterintuitive to humanity s innate predisposition to order the world. By conceding scientific authority to taxonomists, Yoon argues, we've contributed to our own alienation from nature.

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