Sweden: from Linnaeus to Second Life

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A long time since I last had the leisure to contribute to this blog...

On Saturday 27 January, Sweden began yearlong celebrations to mark the 300th anniversary of the birth of Carl Linnaeus (May 23, 1707 – January 10, 1778), its most famous scientist.

Linnaeus is known as the father of modern taxonomy and of ecology. Before him, scientists had tried a variety of criteria to map and organize the world in some decent, rational way. His fundamental idea was to use sex, or rather systems of procreation and reproduction. Since then, whales no longer count as fish, while rats and humans share a closer destiny. He understood the underlying fabric of life better than anyone else who had come before him. And he saw economics and ecology as strictly related.

Linnaeus certainly knew something about the life of information. His mapping was based on a new naming convention, known as the "binary nomenclature", which has come to dominate natural history and other scientific fields. For example, Plato had defined man as a "featherless biped". When Diogenes heard about that, he presented his colleague with a plucked chicken. "Here," he then declared, "is Plato's man!". Plato, a stubborn man, then added "having broad nails" to his original definition. Things had not much improved after that dispute, until Linnaeus' taxonomy catalogued humans as Homo sapiens and primates in the class of mammals, Mammalia - all names and concepts coined by him. He should be the hero of those Analytic philosophers who thought that all good philosophy begins (and perhaps end) with some decent clarification of language and a reliable and rigid terminology.

Linnaeus was ahead of his time. One wonders what he might have come up with, had he been confronted by another chaotic world, that of cyberspace. Any equally genial idea? Would he have given us the right system to map and catalogue all the different creatures and agents inhabiting the digital sphere?

The questions are not entirely speculative. If Linnaeus was a great innovator in the eighteenth century, his fatherland is no less daring today. According to Olle Waestberg, Director of the Swedish Institute, "We are planning to establish a Swedish embassy in Second Life primarily as an information portal for Sweden".

Sweden will soon become the first country to establish official diplomatic representation in the virtual reality world of Second Life. (http://secondlife.com/) It will provide not passports or visas, but documents and information about them and about the country. Linnaeus would certainly have been proud of his imaginative country. The first step is taken. The next will be to explore the new territories with some clear ideas about how to make sense of them.

Comments

  1. MPTue Jan 30, 08:50:00 pm

    Categorisation and mapping the world is in some cases horrible. Saturday 27 january is also a day of remembrance. The red army liberated the remaining 7500 prisoners in the concentration camp auschwitz. The end of an painful era where people were labeld, dehumanized and assassinated.
    The accomplishments of Linnaeus are indeed of an other order. He was a genius like Darwin, Mendel, Watson&Crick etc. The influence of these scientist on biology is enormous. But science needs ethics. That goes for the virtual world too.
    "A world whitout ethics leads to destruction."

    ReplyDelete

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