Patricia Fara: uncertainty

Transcript context

…But not with unique identifiers, right? Everyone would have their own system. There were multiple dimensions. What do you use plants for? Or is the Linnaean system — it more or less did uniquely identify plants, almost like a search engine, in a way that other researchers could work with, and that’s what took so long. Because people classified plants according to why they needed to use them. Plants are mostly used for food and for drugs. John Ray, in the 17th century, did introduce a classification system. It was a different classification system. By the time Linnaeus proposed his, there was several others, and his was strongly opposed. It’s got several important defects, and it’s completely arbitrary, the way that it counts the sexual characteristics of the flowers. Also, roughly half the flora don’t have flowers that you can count the sexual characteristics in that way. It’s a deeply flawed system that was much criticized at the time. It was like all new scientific ideas — it had to be promoted. There had to be almost a sort of public relations exercise to make sure that Linnaean botany was accepted rather than another one. And it’s now being replaced. There’s a lot of debate about whether it is the best and most useful classification system. It’s not absolutely right. It’s just one system of doing it. If we look at 18th-century portraits, either of scientists or of patrons, they rarely seem to be happy. Why is that?…

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