Where do I find the salsa? There are usually multiple correct answers when it comes to organising, categorising, arranging and describing. A practical example (and metaphor) is found in a typical supermarket: in which neatly ordered, labelled and/or numbered grocery aisle does a shopper find a jar of tomato salsa? (Try aisle five.)

Whether they’re called categories, hierarchies, taxonomies, tableaus, classifications, or systems, such descriptors are attempts at making sense of things. However, life is more complicated and dynamic; its interpretations are often ambiguous.

In the mid 1700s, the question was asked: Could someone create a master plan for life on Earth, a logical arrangement that accommodates every single species? Both Carl Linnaeus in Sweden and Georges-Louis de Buffon in France set out on separate, yet related, challenges to categorise life and all its complexity. Horses, butterflies, wheat, moose, aphids, whales, artichokes, boa constrictors and humans.

Every Living Thing presents the intriguing, biographical, human stories of Linnaeus and Buffon (and associates) to illustrate the otherwise abstract historical context of the scientific naming system.

Any approach is prone to over-simplification. Linnaeus’s ‘neatly nested boxes’ were viewed as being ‘incapable of grasping life’s true profusion’. Prone to the ambiguities of classification, the humble jar of salsa probably exists in a few different spots!

Reviewed by Mark Parry

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I’ve lately been drawn to write what I call “human scale history”, nonfiction narratives that feature forgotten or neglected figures from the past—people whose stories deserve to be reclaimed as part of our cultural heritage. Given the under-documented nature of such subjects, the work necessarily goes slowly. But it’s more than worthwhile.

I’m a child of the counterculture – my youth was fairly nomadic, split between California, Hawaii, and the back seat of a Volkswagen bus. I left high school at fourteen, kicking around as a day laborer, dishwasher and late-night disc jockey before studying at the University of California, Santa Cruz. That’s near Silicon Valley, so I taught myself to program, wandered into an engineering job at Apple, then left to write books on technology. After several of those, I launched an early Internet company. (That was a ride, but I was glad to get back to writing books.)

I live in Northern California. I’m extremely left-handed. I play the upright bass. My partner is the journalist and essayist Julia Scott, who does things like slather herself with bacteria, and report from the inside of an iron lung. Life is many things, but boring isn’t one of them.

Visit Jason Roberts’ website