Book Review/Naming Nature
Naming Nature By BILL DUNCAN In my high school years, I was required to take biology. My teacher was Miss Clara Anderson who loved her subject, but hated the classroom. Almost every day, she had her students in her laboratory – the piney woods behind my Gulf Coast Florida school. We learned about the wonders of nature in a hands-on environment. She would turn over a rotting log and we’d discover a whole new world living there. She made nature come alive. When I read Carol Kaesunk Yoon’s just released book “Naming Nature,” I pictured the author as another Clara Anderson taking her readers by the hand and showing them nature in the raw. Even though, Yoon is a scientist, she talks plain English in describing why science is undermining the understanding of nature and distancing us from the wonders of living things. It is a fascinating book, written in Yoon’s journalistic style. She writes for The New York Time’s “Science Times.” She has a biology degree from Yale and a Ph.D in ecology and evolutionary biology from Cornell University. Yoon is the daughter of two scientists who were certainly an influence on her career choice. “This book began a long time ago, somewhere in the forest behind my parents’ house,” she said. “It was there that I first came to understand without even realizing that the living world is not some random mess.” As she grew up and studied more deeply, she discovered how often scientists disagree about exactly how to order that living world. “The field of taxonomy is infamous among biologists for its intractable arguments over classifying plants and animals that continues today among different schools of thought,” she noted. Taxonomy is a branch of biology dealing with the identification and naming of organisms. It actually dates back to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle who first began a discussion on ordering nature. During the 1700s, Swedish botanist Carolus Linneus classified all then-known organisms into two large groups: the kingdoms “Plantae” (plants) and “Animalia” (animals). In 1969, Robert Whittaker proposed five kingdoms: Plantae, Animalia, Fungi, Protista, and Monera. The book explores those disputed classifications and comes to a clear understanding that everything scientists think they know about how to order the living world is far from set. Take for example a rogue band of taxonomists known as the cladists, whose system of ordering living things is based strictly on evolutionary relationships, holding to the Darwinian theory. The cladists say that classifying fish as a separate category makes no scientific sense because of the number of scaly, reptilian species from which fish descended. Her research for this book led her to believe taxonomy is not a “tidy, solid science.” Interestingly, she found that naming nature is an innate instinct. In fact, it is one of the essential – at least in early life – irrepressible functions of the human brain. The reader learns a German word for this instinct, “unwelt,” which means literally “the environment.” In other words, the world around us. Yoon explains that “unwelt” is humanity’s best and most intimate connection to everything that lives. Oddly, the attempts of science to classify living things clashes with the human “unwelt,” and stands in direct conflict with a scientific and evolutionary ordering of life. Shakespeare may have said it best in Romeo and Juliet when he penned the famous line, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.” But to Yoon, the real science is noticing life where it is – all around us. Therefore she invites us to venture outdoors and see the wonders of life without disputing the evolutionary origins of its existence. This book will take you into the woods to explore those wonders. (Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday.com or by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470) 
The clash between instinct and science
By Carol Kaesunk Yoon
W.W. Norton & C.
Hardcover $27.95
The News-Review