Naming Nature

by Carol Kaesuk Yoon

Finalist for the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science and Technology: the surprising, untold story about the poetic and deeply human (cognitive) capacity to name the natural world.

Biologist and journalist Carol Kaesuk Yoon takes us beyond genus and species to deep cognition, revealing our drive to name life. She tells the strange story of scientists leading people away from the impulse to name the living world, even as they are driven by it.

Naming Nature, sure to delight readers who love words and nature, is a rich journey of naming from Linnaeus, whose system turned classification from a hobby to a science, and Darwin, who ended the idea of rigid species definitions, to today’s dream of naming all of earth’s species and listing them online.

Readers will see science’s limitations and will feel the urgency of staying connected to the natural world by using familiar, rather than scientific, names. Naming Nature illuminates the reasons why we might care less whether a whale is a fish or a mammal as long as we know its importance in our world.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Nature, History, Biology, Natural History, History Of Science

353 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Carol Kaesuk Yoon was born and raised in Massachusetts, spending much of her childhood roaming around in the forest behind her house, that or reading comic books. At Yale she studied biology and then went on to get a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell, where she did research on the evolution and genetics of fruitfly mating songs.

After grad school, instead of getting a normal post-doctoral position, she became a fellow with a program that takes disgruntled science graduate students and plops them down into news outlets to try out being journalists. She was sent to The Oregonian, Portland’s daily paper where, to her amazement, since the only news she regularly read was the arts section, she fell in love with science news writing.

The following winter, she started writing for The New York Times as a news clerk in the science section until she left to become a regular and frequent contributor from afar here and afar there, lovely and interesting work where she was able to think and write about science for the Times, be edited by and interact with some really smart and cool people, and live wherever life took her.

Then in 2009, a longstanding fascination she had with taxonomy - which everyone thinks is dull and fusty, but is actually a bizarre and ancient practice that reveals fundamental truths about what it is to be human - led to the publication of her book Naming Nature.

She has lived for almost two decades in Bellingham, Washington with her husband, Merrill Peterson, a biologist at Western Washington University, and their son. Their daughter has fledged and makes art. She writes, plays with the family’s hypo-allergenic cat and reads. She also likes to go outside to look for animals, and she also spend a fair amount of time messing with her typewriter collection.

Reviews

[Dr. Carl Ludwig Dorsch · Rating 2 out of 5]

“The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.” – E. O. Wilson


One reason I read few books is that they are usually written by human persons, and I have a dim view of the human person. On the other hand of course, books produced by editorial committee usually suffer from their own incoherence and disorganization, which perhaps suggests an equally dim prospect for human cooperation.

“Naming Nature” is written by a very evident individual and centers on a single organizing principle, described by the author as a revelation of sorts: that humans possess an intuitive native sense of the organization of the “natural world,” a sense made manifest (though there much extended and elaborated) in traditional Linnaean taxonomy. Upon this the author hangs a sketch of the history of the naming and organization of the planet’s species through Linnaeus, Darwin, Mendel, Mayr, numeric and molecular taxonomic methods, and finally contemporary (and wholly evolutionarily determined) cladistics and systematics.

Dr. Yoon connects her claim of an innate human understanding of biological organization with that fairly standard history-of-science narrative in terms of ever an increasing conflict and contradiction, observing the descriptions of taxonomy growing ever more distant and removed from life as experienced.

Then, with this widening gulf in mind, she turns to what she holds to be the public’s indifference and/or incomprehension in the face of scientific authority’s report on the planet’s various biological crises (of bio-diversity, “the sixth great extinction,” the health of non-biological natural systems, etc.), suggesting that this unresponsiveness is the result, at least in some significant part, of the growing distance between the premises and language of natural science and the public’s “natural” sense of things.

However, much as this public policy dilemma might seem to be the intended pinnacle of her argument, that issue is not, evidently, the real point at all. The actual protagonist of “Naming Nature” is the “umwelt,” a term Dr. Yoon has appropriated from the work of Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944), an invertebrate researcher who early in the 20th century, apparently taking Kant to heart, began to focus on the phenomenology of the animals he studied, hoping to explore them “as subjects, not objects.” (To the extent Uexküll became preoccupied with the internal dynamics of his species’ umwelt, his work seems now mainly grist for semioticians and cybernetic studies.)

And from this attempt to map the cognitive feedback loops of ticks, sea urchins and amoebae, Dr. Yoon has derived her own rather diminished human analog, that of our species’ ostensible inborn ordering of the plants and animals we encounter.

In describing her use of the term, Yoon enlists a fair amount of more or less suggestive evidence. Among the more persuasive: a universal similarity in the anthropological record of folk taxonomies, the wide instance of human binomial naming (from pin oak to New York to Lao Tze), and the dramatic phenomenon of discrete neurological deficit leading to the inability to name or recognize, exclusively, living things.

Those examples, however, stand among a flood of alleged umwelt manifestations in “Naming Nature,” some registering almost as mere curiosities, if that: the “fact” that folk taxonomies and perhaps human memory (as suggested by the listings of Dioscorides, her own husband and others) might self-limit at 500 to 600 genera, and that those folk taxonomies regularly correlate species as “brother,” “sister,” or “parent” species; that many non-human species are able to name, sort and communicate varieties of creatures (usually predators) active in their environments; that in a large-sample study students unfamiliar with the Huambisa language (of the Peruvian rain forest) scored a 58% hit rate identifying Huambisa species names as either fish or fowl; and that, of her own daughter’s first 25 spoken words, 13 of them referred to living things…

On the same tack as the last example Yoon also considers the decoration of North American children’s rooms (all those little bunnies, duckies, teddy bears and other stuffed animals) and the tales those children are told: “The Cat in the Hat,” “Peter Rabbit,” “Winnie-the-Pooh,” etc.

And occasionally she wanders still farther afield, as when (after suggesting the mysteries of chicken sexing are somehow umwelt related) she considers the modern excellence in commercial taxonomy, the skills displayed in navigating a world of brands and logos, the naming and recognizing of the creatures of commerce, the Nikes, McDonalds, M&Ms, Fords, etc., citing along the way a Dutch study in which two year olds demonstrated their proficiency at identifying brands as distant from their lives as Mercedes, Heineken and Camel – a line of thought easily casting more doubt on the biological essence of her umwelt theory than clearly reinforcing it.

As we’ve seen, Yoon often points to the child’s apprehension of the natural world, and it might not be too unfair to characterize her umwelt claim in those terms: we humans possess a simple, innate, likely hardwired mode of perception for the organization of the species around us: There are trees. There are shrubs. There are flowers. There are birds, fish and creepy-crawly things. And not only are there dogs, but there are poodle dogs, German shepherd dogs, daschund dogs, terrier dogs, etc. Not only trees but maple trees, and not only maple trees but silver maple trees, red maple trees, Norway maple trees, etc. This is how we naturally think: rather like children, but in a mode capable of Linnaean extension and sophistication.

However, Yoon reminds us, science has come to claim otherwise. There actually are no fish, per se, systematics instructs. Whales are related to camels and hippopotami, lungfish more akin to cows than salmon, birds are dinosaurs, etc. Our minds, she argues, have turned against themselves. The book’s subtitle is: “The Clash Between Instinct and Science.”

So, what is Dr. Yoon describing?

First of all she is describing what, notwithstanding Science’s great expedition from the prima facie to the occult, remains still nameless: the biota, the bios, the creature systematics (so far) insists we are, the enormous assemblage of familiar cellular and subcellular routines occupying the planet’s skin from miles below its surface to miles above it, much varied in accidentals but apparently essentially one in gist (if not quite in simple lineage), the many billion year old multiform entity presently sending tracers (microbial, for the most part) out into and beyond our star system.

And when human language (or English at least) at last gives this thing a common name, will it be some defeat of our special “human nature” as manifest in Dr. Yoon’s umwelt? A victory for our nonhuman identity? For the mind? For truth?

Then secondly, Dr. Yoon is describing the mind, the mind at work.

The obvious fact that the history of many, if not most human disciplines follows a trajectory similar to that of taxonomy is not commented upon. As these too have become increasingly specialized and esoteric, a good many of the recent claims of mathematics, astronomy, geology, microbiology, even human history itself, might be seen as equally absurd on their face and likewise counter to our presumed and intuited understandings of the world.

(And the works of our hands? 100 floor buildings, 200,000 ton ships, mile long bridge spans? None of these are conceivable without modes of analysis far beyond the sensible, the familiar, the expected, the intuitive or the obvious.)

And is it because this sort of discrepancy is so obvious that “Naming Nature” never names it? Or is it rather that if named, it might suggest something of a category error, at least by omission, on Dr. Yoon’s part?

That there are discrete areas (of some kind) of the human brain strongly implicated in the naming and recognition of plants and animals (as there are as well for the naming and recognition of faces, facial emotions, colors, clothing, letters, body parts, tools, abstract vs. concrete entities, naturally occurring vs. manufactured entities, fruits and vegetables, place names, verbs, etc.) is, like so many reports of anomia generally, strangely fascinating and almost irresistible in its apparent hint at some profound root of humanity, if not some deeper essence of mind and matter. But as the above parenthetical catalog suggests, that particular aphasia is hardly unique.

Children can indeed be regularly fascinated with learning complicated dinosaur (and Pokeman) taxonomies, but those propensities (to whatever extent they are universal, or have universal analogs) neither seem exceptional nor hardly even remarkable in view of the larger landscape of human cognitive development ranging from the acquisition of handedness, language and number, the flowering of complex make-believe and story-telling activities, through the hundreds of other stereotypical behaviors our species’ children are thrall to.

Finally, whether or not Dr. Yoon has produced a convincing demonstration of the special corner of human phenomenology she has tagged the “umwelt,” that demonstration would not be, in itself, an identification of the crux of "The Clash Between Instinct and Science.” Dr. Yoon’s umwelt (and her umwelt conflict) are ultimately only an instance of something wider and deeper than the conflict between our apprehension of other species and the evolving sophistication of modern natural science, and that she does not bring herself to consider that broader view eventually leaves “Naming Nature” frustratingly lacking and disappointingly naive.

It is hard of course to fault a history of taxonomy for not unraveling the knots of human consciousness, but Yoon has, quite self-consciously, stepped beyond any attempt at simple history and into that other larger realm. That departure I have no argument with, contextualization is a good thing, investigation of the implicit ground of an argument a good thing. My argument is simply that Dr. Yoon never really does either, never passes beyond her umwelt antechamber, nor even acknowledges it as such. So amazed by the unexpected discovery of this umwelt space and the illumination it apparently provides, she never proceeds to qualify or contextualize the place itself.

Given the turn her volume took (to her own admitted surprise) I would have taken a single chapter (at least) of such context. A recognition of the peculiarities of human intellection generally, a bit of serious reflection on the relation of things, thought and language and the business of experience and perception, ideation and abstraction, on the nature of mind in short, even if not a full essay on phenomenology, critical philosophy, or current thinking in the philosophy or neurology of consciousness.

In the end though, perhaps I misspoke when suggesting the protagonist of “Naming Nature” was Dr. Yoon’s umwelt. In a real sense the protagonist of “Naming Nature” is Carol Yoon herself and its story is that of her umwelt epiphany; it is a conversion narrative full of the biography, confused excitement and enthusiasm (along with a bit of naive prescription) conversion accounts regularly entail.

And like many converts to a newly discovered grand organizing principle – the Freudian or Marxist economy, the Masonic conspiracy or even the presence of an attentive deity – it seems Dr. Yoon cannot imagine the insights of her epiphany as ever being less than central to the history of life and mind on the planet, rather than merely an aspect of it.

Eventually perhaps all epiphanies require curing, all need to shrink a bit to be finally and profitably integrated into a broader fabric of thought and understanding.

Even God maybe, once met, has to be put in place. If so, likely also the activities of the superior temporal sulcus and the lateral fusiform gyrus.

[Malcolm Logscribe · Rating 2 out of 5]

The bits about the history of taxonomy as a science could have been an interesting book.

The bits about folk taxonomy and how people categorize life could have been an interesting book.

Framing them in opposition to each other, though? There was lots of talk about the "destruction" of fish, of the idea that fish "don't exist". Why? Flightless birds exist as actual, physical creatures with features in common, and not classifying them together doesn't alter their existence. You can group animals based on relatedness and also have a mental group for animals that might eat you, regardless of how close crocodiles and bears are on your relatedness list. You can have a group of animals you call fish because of their appearance/behaviour, and the fact that it's not a "real" group in other contexts isn't relevant at all to this one.

Just... is there something I'm missing? Why wasn't this two interesting shorter pieces?

(She was disappointingly vague about the facts she did present, not giving anything like enough detail - when talking about where the brain stores information about living things vs constructed objects, but with no mention of anything that wasn't clearly delineated as one or the other, or of whether this was identical for people in cultures that consider some things I class as inanimate to be animate, or whether this translates across cultures at all - so the two theoretical books are unlikely to have been great, but I would have enjoyed them more.)

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

From Wikipedia - a discussion of the word "umwelt":

Each functional component of an umwelt has a meaning and so represents the organism's model of the world. It is also the semiotic world of the organism, including all the meaningful aspects of the world for any particular organism, i.e. it can be water, food, shelter, potential threats, or points of reference for navigation. An organism creates and reshapes its own umwelt when it interacts with the world. This is termed a 'functional circle'. The umwelt theory states that the mind and the world are inseparable, because it is the mind that interprets the world for the organism. Consequently, the umwelten of different organisms differ, which follows from the individuality and uniqueness of the history of every single organism. When two umwelten interact, this creates a semiosphere.

As a term, umwelt also unites all the semiotic processes of an organism into a whole. Internally, an organism is the sum of its parts operating in functional circles and, to survive, all the parts must work together co-operatively. This is termed the 'collective umwelt' which models the organism as a centralised system from the cellular level upward. This requires the semiosis of any one part to be continuously connected to any other semiosis operating within the same organism. If anything disrupts this process, the organism will not operate efficiently. But, when semiosis operates, the organism exhibits goal-oriented or intentional behaviour.


Why is this important? Because I felt like the word was on every page of this book.

Despite the repetition that bugged me, this was quite interesting. It's a history and discussion of taxonomy (scientific classification) which sounds like really dry reading but it's not. I learned a lot about Linnaeus, Darwin, E.O. Wilson and the different types of taxonomy as they were developed through the years.

Science lovers would enjoy this book.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

A perfect book to follow Andrea Wulf's The Brother Gardeners, Naming Nature examines the development of taxonomy from Linnaeus to cladistics with interesting coverage of evolutionary biology, numerical taxonomy, and molecular biology. Yoon is fascinated with the human Umwelt and its role both in creating traditional taxonomy and in causing our resistance to the science of cladistics. According to Yoon, the human brain is wired to take a taxonomic view of nature, and the parameters of that taxonomy are remarkably consistent across cultures. She regrets that the new science of cladistics serves to distance humans from nature by creating taxonomies that are (in some notable cases) absolutely counterintuitive, because they do not match the human Umwelt. Despite the importance of the book and all that I learned from it, I do have a few quibbles. The illustrations do not greatly advance one's understanding of the text, particularly since the captions are merely quotations from the text. The book is overwritten and could have been much shorter without losing its value. The prose hardly matches the excitement of the subject and suffers from repetition -- the word "umwelt" seemed to occur hundreds of times, although surely it occurred only in many scores of sentences. Nevertheless, I found the book both interesting and informative and recommend it to anyone with an interest in how humans categorize the natural world.

[Debbie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating book about the history of scientific classification of nature that started with Linneaus. This is a book about the history of taxonomy. I never knew that his classifications were replaced in the 80's with a whole new system. Author goes on a bit too long about the "ummwelt", the built-in view of ordering that humans have in their brains. I skipped a chapter or two.

[Katie Keeshen]

Interesting book but suffers a bit from feeling a little padded out and overly repetitive. Feels like we hit the same few points too many times. Some really interesting stuff in the conversations around our connections to nature and how we can reconnect.

[Katie · Rating 1 out of 5]

The overly-romanticized first 50 pages seem to get very tied up in semantics. Mainly, the idea that "fish are not a thing" - true, fish are a paraphyletic clade in the tree of life, meaning that mammals, amphibians, and reptiles all descended from a fish ancestor. But that does not mean fish are "not real". Fish, like mammals, are ecologically relevant groupings of animals. The fact they are not a monophyletic grouping is irrelevant; it is like complaining that Pluto is no longer a true planet. We may classify Pluto now as a "dwarf planet", but it hasn't disappeared. It is just our artificial classification system that has changed. Isn't it so much more exciting to have learned about the vast diversity of planets (or fish) and have improved our understanding of how animals (or rocks in space) fit into the bigger picture?

I was disappointed to not see more discussion of "folk taxonomies", with the author focussing on only a few examples of matchup and contrast with "real" taxonomies.

As a history of the development of the science of taxonomy, the book is okay. But the heavily romanticized concept of the "umwelt" is overdrawn and weak. The point of the book is unclear. Is it to describe the science of taxonomy? To criticize it? To push for more science/nature literacy? It's all a bit of a mess, and repeats itself heavily. Could have been half as long.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book includes an engaging and very colorful history of how taxonomy has developed as a science. At times it was perhaps too colorful, with overly dramatic descriptions, broad generalizations, and injections of the author's opinion and personal experiences. Although taxonomy is a very broad field, this book focuses more on modern biology and barely addresses paleontology at all (even when discussing evolution!) which feels like a glaring omission that isn't explained.

Alongside the history of taxonomic science, the author explores a concept she terms the "umwelt," which is the way that we as humans perceive the natural world and categorize life according to our instincts or some intangible feeling. Just as the title suggests (the clash between instinct and science), the umwelt and scientific taxonomy are contrasted throughout, with the author concluding (in her personal opinion) that both are "correct," but the umwelt is maybe better.

This book could have been a lot shorter than it is and lose no content; the main points are repeated over and over. But if you are willing to live with certain aspects of the writing style, this book is a very entertaining account of what is often (falsely!) perceived to be a very boring field of science, and I think both scientists and non-scientists would find it digestible and fascinating.

Memorable snippets:

On taxonomy as a science:

"Taxonomy is instead a science born out of an ancient human practice--the ordering and naming of life--out of the urgings of the human umwelt. The umwelt quickly became the field's great and enduring weakness, however, because the umwelt's vision of life turns out to be absolutely the wrong thing upon which to base a science." (Chapter 1)

"taxonomy was born not as a scholarly endeavor, not as an intellectual pursuit, but as a human predilection, a hard-wired and ageless tradition." (Chapter 7)

"the history of taxonomy should instead be viewed as the story of the emergence of an actual science out of a long and thoroughly unscientific human tradition. It should be viewed as the slow and painful wrenching away of a discipline from the call of the vision of life that inspired it, from our deepest and most profound connection to what lives." (Chapter 12)

"The war against the human umwelt--amidst the triumph of the birth of a modern science and the tragedy of the discovery of a dying world--already had been won." (Chapter 10)

On barnacles, and tackling a project that spirals out of control:

"barnacles were thought to have miniature geese, fully formed, hidden inside them, the so-called barnacle geese. (Barnacle geese, of course, hatch from eggs, like all other respectable geese.)" (Chapter 3)

"It was just one single sort of little creature, one barnacle; how tough could it be? But as Darwin pondered his barnacles, he could have no idea what he was getting himself into. [...] Darwin was about to begin a side project of epic proportions, what would be eight grueling years of struggle all over the barnacles. [...] But the suffering was all worth it, because Darwin felt he was unveiling one barnacle blockbuster after another. [...] Darwin was in barnacle heaven, completely smitten. Each new finding was a wonder to him and a matter of real urgency. [...] That was how the barnacle work had gotten so completely out of hand. That was why what should have been a tidy array of barnacle species was in Darwin's mind a helter-skelter chaotic mess. [...] he was more than ready to be finished. 'I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before,' he would write, 'not even a sailor in a slow-sailing ship.' " (Chapter 3)

"Darwin had only succeeded in turning what was already going to be a difficult job into a monstrously difficult one." (Chapter 3)

On taxonomists and their drama:

"Alternating between ranting and raving against one another and ever more ashamedly lurking about in the dusty halls of museums, taxonomists were being left behind, ancient-seeming relics in the otherwise lively new science of biology." (Chapter 4)

"evolutionary taxonomists, those rugged curmudgeons" (Chapter 7)

"The cladists, however, seemed to find it great fun. Even though they were busy killing off one group after another, the ritual killing of the fish seemed to be a particular favorite. They took a special glee in reenacting the sacrifice to every audience, which would reliably be stunned, angry, irritated, and disbelieving." (Chapter 10)

"There were personal vendettas, romances, backstabbings, self-sacrifices, betrayals, and death by friendly fire. As Joseph Felsenstein, a statistician working on problems in taxonomy, remarked, 'Someday someone will write the history of this infighting; perhaps only those who were there will believe it.'" (Chapter 10)

On "species":

"Never mind that defining a species was like trying to capture, in words, a moment in time, a bit of the flow of a river, a thing that by its very nature was ever-changing and had no clear beginning or end." (Chapter 4)

"Never mind that there remains no agreed-upon definition for a species or that there will almost certainly never be one. Never mind that a species is in fact an ever-evolving entity, as opposed to a fixed, definable, delineated thing. Species are what we cannot help but see." (Chapter 12)

On undead dinosaurs:

"if you want to call that branch of the tree of life the dinosaurs, then you'll have to declare the birds dinosaurs as well. Suddenly, dinosaurs are no longer extinct. There goes one now--perhaps a pigeon flying past your window, a mourning dove on the telephone wire, the dino that coos softly about your home." (Chapter 10)

[Burcu Türkoğlu · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is a bit repetitive at times, and I found certain analogies connecting the history of taxonomy to modern sociopolitical issues slightly too shallow. I didn’t mind the former much. Since it’s not fiction, the repetition somewhat reinforced the arguments on a topic I don’t know much about.

I thought the book was interesting mainly because it constantly made me reflect on the perception/conception distinction. It was insightful to see how knowledge shaped by the 'umwelt' led to comparable outcomes in natural and social sciences. As the classification of living beings based on perception contributed to racism and eugenics by ultimately hierarchising humans based on what they look like, the urge to slap a label on anything that seems even slightly different has shaped the habits of quantitative social science researchers, who heroically pull apart concepts like equality and justice as if they’ve never met, only to end up saying nothing particularly meaningful.

[Beverly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've always been attracted to the taxonomy of plants without knowing much about it. Now I know more thanks to this accessible history of taxonomy. I've been thinking about it from a naturalist perspective so I was surprised to discover how purely scientific taxonomy has become. This is Yoon's thesis- that the scientific approach to classification entailing numbers, microscopes, and strict criteria of evolution has become detached from our instinctive feeling for the world around us. But it also makes sense that scientific study has moved in this direction.

[Christy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Preliminary review: I'm giving this two stars instead of one solely because I now know more about the history of taxonomy than I did before and have discovered that it's actually interesting (even if I did have to sort through Yoon's language and ridiculous argument to get at that history). Longer review to come.

[Hanna Piatt · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book took me a month to read for a reason. While an interesting topic—why and how humans name nature—it was unbearably repetitive. The author took every opportunity to remind the reader what the word “umwelt” meant, and I mean nearly every time the word was used. This book was about 300ish pages but could have been 150, and that makes me mad. Other than that, an interesting read.

[Audrey Driscoll · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a history of taxonomy and its relationship with science and with human perception of patterns among living things. Sometimes those elements are in synch and sometimes they are in conflict. I'm still not sure I understand Yoon's take on the umwelt, however, and I disagree that people's lack of awareness of the natural world is linked to scientific taxonomy. I have paid attention to news about science all my life and consider myself well-informed about it, but until I read this book I was totally unaware of the "death of the fish." I'm also a gardener and familiar with the Linnaean classification of plants, binomial species names, etc. I have noticed that some of these names have been changed in recent years, no doubt because of the activities of those pesky scientists. That hasn't affected my own interest in and relationship with plants, however. I think what has damaged humanity's awareness of nature is the diversion of our collective attention to things of our own creation, rather than too much science. I do agree with Yoon's conclusion that we all have to get out of the mall and away from our screens and pay attention to creatures other than ourselves, however we classify them.
Overall, this book was interesting and informative, with an approachable style and a lot of humour. Anyone looking for jokes about taxonomy should definitely read it.

[Ameliarator]

Mixed feelings. At times it seemed the author was trying too hard and overstating the case, or oversimplifying concepts, and I had trouble following all the things she was attributing to the umwelt, or maybe I had trouble remembering the definition of umwelt. I enjoyed hearing about the history of taxonomy, her personal experiences as a scientist, and the idea of respecting and valuing folk taxonomy.

[Micah · Rating 3 out of 5]

How many times can you use the word umwelt in a book? Read this book to find out (it’s a lot)

[Anya · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 stars! Interesting ideas that are frustratingly not fleshed out.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Discovered because Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life became more famous, but admits that it owes a lot to this one.

A gentle read, so to speak. More of an exploration than a declaration. I'm having trouble pulling out ideas to refer to in order to write a properly helpful review. It's more of a gestalt experience, at least so far. I do admit that I'm finding it soothing and have fallen asleep to it for three nights now....

(I see negative reviews... from people who are missing the point, and/or are reading it for something it's not meant to be. Too bad they were misled by poor expectations.)
---
Ok done.
So, yeah, the point is the comparison of the umwelt we evolved to have, to more formal systems of taxonomy needed as we learned more about life on the planet beyond our community. And as taxonomy got more scientific, and as our experiences with nature diminished for other reasons, ordinary people subconsciously felt excluded. Therefore they/we feel less interested, therefore less invested, until now we're in the middle of the 6th extinction that we're causing and that we're not doing diddly about.

Interestingly, we still are wired to have an umwelt. Some kids use it during their dinosaur phase. Most of us use it to recall brand names and categories. And notice that those also have two part names, like Toyota Prius, or Samsung Galaxy. (my examples)

I have a lot of bookdarted passages to add, give me a few hours so I can walk and have breakfast first. Maybe I'll see a house finch (Finch House, so to speak), and maybe I'll have some Oatmeal Quaker. ;)
---
Ok I'm back:

Ernst Mayr "was a man who was certain that he was right, always, no matter how many times he changed his mind, a man for whom Gray was merely misperceived black or white."

Some lizards produce asexually, like clones... I'll have to research.

More about what the umwelt means and why we humans all have it in common: "Picture shrubs and trees. ... They are two parts of one spectrum. Yet we always recognize the two distinct categories. Why? Because they are beacons on the landscape that is our own world, the perceived world in which we humans live every day. When we look at the world with our characteristically human eyes, the scrubby shrubs simply pop out as quite different from the towering trees. In the same way, we never fail to notice the birds and never fail to miss the bacteria."

There probably will never be a completely satisfactory definition of species. Which makes classification systems (taxonomies) challenging, no matter the methodology. One statistical graph is mentioned as revelatory but insufficiently explained so I'll have to look for more about it. Willis's curve that plots # of genera against # of species in the genera says that the majority of genera have one or just a few species.

Numerical taxonomy was an interesting development. In its quest to be completely objective it got an awful lot wrong,* but it did shake off some of the dust. "This illustration [flowchart] from Sokal and Sneath's book shows a modern vision that was worlds away from Linnaeus's sensuous exuberance."

(*Couldn't see characteristics smaller than the microscope or visible only to UV etc. Didn't have anything to do with the timeline of evolution. Etc.)

Then we have Carl Woese, RNA, and the three domains of Bacteria, Archaebacteria, and Eukaryotes. Never mind the Kingdoms that I was taught, apparently. And about the same time, iiuc, "To surrender to Hennig was to surrender your umwelt."

"Fruit flies... are probably most familiar as the tiny golden-bodied insects in kitchens... you may witness little skinny fruit flies (the males) chasing stouter fruit flies (the females) across the banana. If you see one of those males with one wing stuck out at a 90° angle to his body, you'll know that he is singing."

"The McDonald's logo is so easy to store in the mind that crows can recognize the comely golden arches. When offered a choice of bags -- both filled with aromatic, tasty food -- if one is a plain bag and the other carries the McDonald's logo, crows will always go for the McDonald's bag first."

Anyway, this was just a wonderful read. I'm glad I took my time with it, too.

[Drew Villeneuve · Rating 3 out of 5]

The overall concept of this book, that taxonomy is ultimately a human endeavor (like language) and subject to foibles of human perception, is an interesting one and more than worthy of writing treatment. Humans, Yoon notes, are evolutionary hardwired to categorize and classify, which has aided the survival of our species. The fact that we can align organisms by use, danger, or beauty in a broad mental taxonomy is incredibly useful, and also explains much of the modern west's affinity for splashy advertising logos that capture this innate ability for commercial ends. The existence of folk taxonomies agrees with this, which is interesting in that they sometimes reveal relationships and new species that modern science was not aware of, and sometimes at odds with scientific understanding.

This is all quite interesting, but I felt that Yoon lost the thread a bit halfway through the book as she reveals the inadequacy of traditional taxonomy sorting the vibrant diversity of evolution in the natural world. Her argument that human perception, or umwelt, blinds us to the true evolutionary order of the world is a true obstacle to this science, but I found she weighed too heavily on this concept, and ultimately it became heavily overused. I would recommend interested readers to read Ed Yong's An Immense World for a much clearer and well-written dive into human and organism perception (the umwelt).

I took major issue with her end conclusion to the fact that fish do not exist as a true taxonomic group according to cladistics. First, I felt she kept representing a cladistic understanding of science as this crazy outlier in evolutionary biology that mainstream biologists struggle to accept. She makes claims about this debate with no primary source citations or quotes, relying on her own experience of the cladistics v. traditional taxonomy debate to support this claim, which she does repeatedly. Second, she made the argument that the cladistic's world view is partly responsible for people's alienation to nature, and why modern kids aren't able to recognize multiple species of flower or insect. I couldn't more vehemently disagree - people's alienation to nature is due to a whirlwind of socio-economic forces in the western world preoccupied with profit and progress, not because of modern taxonomic science! Revealing to a group of high schoolers that a sea squirt, a blobby looking marine organism, is a chordate and thus more closely related to humans than octopi is an incredibly transforming moment that makes them want to more closely examine the real world. This relationship between a sea squirt and humans is best supported by a cladistic analysis. I firmly think revealing the intricacies of the web of life draws us closer to nature, not farther away. This puts me in odds with her final conclusion, which is to harangue the reader to strictly view the world through the cladistic lens - you must either acknowledge fish do not exist, full stop, or you must call whales and birds and humans fish. This was at odds with her earlier thesis that modern evolutionary science draws people away from nature (an extraordinary claim from an evolutionary biologist! Yoon has a PhD in EEB). I do not find it difficult at all to hold two concepts in my mind, that technically fish do not exist as an evolutionary outgroup, and that fish is an incredible useful and valid grouping that everyone from fisheries biologists and ichthyologists to fishers use.

I would recommend Lulu Miller's Why Fish Don't Exist for a much more personal, but ultimately more clear-eyed and accurate, treatment of the taxonomic status of fish (it's actually incredible - you should absolutely read it).

[Barry · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an interesting book. I'm mostly glad I read it, and while it held my interest it is difficult to recommend others to read it. It rather felt like there were three books mashed into one, ineffectively. The historical bits were the best and by far the most interesting and coherently organized. Interspersed with the coherent parts were rabbit trails into the author's own personal experiences and thoughts, monologues about evolution, and an odd fascination with the 'umvelt' (instinct?).

The author's own personal experiences and thoughts were fine to read about but would have been better had they been included in a memoir rather than a historical exploration of taxonomy. Her adherence to evolution, while admirable, came across as cloying and a fervent attempt to convince herself that evolution really is true. She goes so far as to call it a fact and denigrates anyone who dares conceive of an alternate explanation for the existence of life. In the end, Ms. Yoon's platitudes come across as self-serving sacrifices to her god, Evolution.

But the real oddity of the book is the umvelt, which apparently is hard to explain, because despite all her repeated attempts she never really accomplishes it. The subtitle of the book includes the word instinct, and that seems as good of an explanation as any behind the idea of the umvelt. Waxing long about the umvelt ended up feeling like an attempt to say something new instead of being content to compile what could have been a nice account of the history of taxonomy. Just using the word instinct would have cut about 50 pages out of the book and made it more readable.

In short, this book needs more aggressive editing. There were long paragraphs that were unnecessary because they expand on a simple idea that needed only a sentence to explain. The added explanations were tiresome and even a little insulting; does Ms. Yoon view humanity as a collection of dimwits? There was an entire chapter (or was it two?) on brain damaged people whose presence in the book baffled me. Ostensibly the chapters were there to explain the umvelt, but they served as a distraction - albeit an interesting one - and felt like a cheap way to hit a target number of pages.

And then there was the death of the fish. Ms. Yoon harped on this theme so much, attention grabbing as it may be, that by the time she actually explained how 'the fish died' it was anticlimactic. The new-namers say you can't have a fish family because you need to include cows in with fish according to their fancy-pants evolutionary theory. No joke: cows go with the fish. Humans possibly go in the same grouping, but details on exactly how the new-namers divide the animal kingdom were very vague.

Again, this is an interesting book and I learned a fair amount about taxonomy. The historical part of the book is very well-written and well worth reading, but if that is what you are looking for I imagine there are other books about there that better serve the purpose.

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating history of taxonomy from Linnaeus to attempted evolutionary taxonomy to numerical taxonomy to molecular(DNA)taxonomy and finally to the logical use of evolutionary clades. The author while clearly in the scientific camp bemoans the loss of the more instinctive or intuitive method used by Linnaeus. She points out that anthropologists have discovered a certain cultural universality in the ordering of plant and animal species-- what she calls our "umweld".
Ms Yoon goes further in blaming biological science and scientists for the loss of our "umweld" which she says has resulted in our crass indifference to the preservation of species and biological diversity.
She even suggests that we are responsible for much of species extinction due to this crass indifference-- while clearly species extinction has been a consequence of evolution since the beginning of life.
I think her arguments become strained when she claims our instinct for biological classification has been replaced by "brand recognition". I further think she misses the broader view that all of scientific investigation has become less intuitive or instinctive. Little of the most important science today would satisfy the old Baconian test of direct seeing, sensing, tasting, etc. We have necessarily become much more dependent on the use of models, theories and strong but indirect evidence. When science entered the study of the largest and smallest entities, Cosmology and atomic and sub atomic physics, we had left behind the "umweld" which the author describes. That "umweld" is necessarily stuck in place and time.
However, none of this is intended to eliminate the usefulness of our "umweld" in our daily lives. The analogy to Newtonian vs. Einstein views of gravity is very appropriate. Newtonian physics works very well in our every day lives and its results can be taken with assurance. We simple need to be aware of the limitation of our "umweld".

[Rae · Rating 4 out of 5]

I ended up really liking this book a lot. I was afraid the author was going to get a little too preachy on the need for us to reconnect with the natural world in this day and age - but it wasn't too much. I really like the idea of the human umwelt (world view) and I agreed with the author that there was room for both our view of the world (with fish) and the current taxonomies that have meant there is no fish category. The fish is dead. Long live the fish.

Overview of what I learned from this book
Basically, the idea is that humans have a basic way of looking at the world - our umwelt - that organizes, categorizes, and names the natural world. Linneaus was very good at understanding this and initial natural taxonomies were based on this. Later taxonomists however attempted to create taxonomies based on evolution, statistics, molecular similarities, and eventually DNA to discover how related nature is to itself. Which moved our understanding of the world away from our umwelt making it more the realm of scientists than us. From this, we learned there is no category of "fish" and that a lungfish is more related to a cow than a salmon and that fungus is closer to mammals than plants. Things that fly in the face of "sense." But it allows us to understand the evolutionary similarities and relationships between things. It's not wrong. But also it's not wrong that there is a category called fish.

[Kevin Thomsen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mildly interesting history of taxonomy, but Yoon spends too much time telling us how rude and ugly her intellectual enemies are. She does that thing you see a lot in pop anthropology where they cherry-pick several disparate civilizations and a couple isolated tribes, notice a similar trait, and declare that all humans who have ever lived in every society share that trait. Unfortunately the worst part is the book's main thesis.

Apparently all humans have this magical "Umwelt" (just an overused buzzword for "how we see and order things, mostly animals and plants, but other stuff too, sort of") except for people with brain damage and mathematicians, who are evil and basically not human. Cladistic taxonomy is causing people to lose touch with their Umwelt, and this is the direct and sole cause of all our environmental ills, like mass extinction, pollution, and climate change. The solution to all this is vibes.

I'm imagining a 1930 Carol Yoon railing against subatomic particles, saying that ivory tower scientists are undermining the human spirit that intuitively understands atoms are indivisible, which caused World War I somehow.

[Bob Gustafson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love science history and this time I was in biological, rather than physical, science. This is the story of Linneas, and then everything that happened after him, written for intelligent people who may, or may not, be smart about in biology. What earned this book the fifth star was Yoon's personalized editorial at the end, which I happen to strongly agree with.

[Katharine Holden · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wish this book could be re-written by someone who writes well. There are many interesting points mentioned in the introduction, and I looked forward to reading more, but the writing quality is so poor it's hard to stay focused or interested, and the tone--not very bright 10th grader on sugar high--is tiresome.

[Tony · Rating 2 out of 5]

If Naming Nature is about the history of how different tribes and cultures name their surrounding, it would have been more interesting. I would totally read (even if fictional) a book about the fight among numerical, molecular and cladistic taxonomists.

Instead, it focuses on (and trying to preserve) the human umwelt (six sense) on ordering the living things around them.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

The best parts of this book were those describing the development of taxonomy and nomenclature. However, I don't buy into Yoon's argument concerning the role of modern systematics in the death of what she terms the "umwelt" - the ability of humans to perceive the natural world.

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall, learning about the history of taxonomy was interesting, but I can see why other reviewers got put out by Yoon's need to include and repetitively argue her own idea of 'umwelt' and her seemingly obsessive compulsion of inserting the word into the text.

[Rainer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Go outside with this book. Be thankful you still can.

[Zee Crowe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book!
(Full disclosure : I am a professional horticulturist and self-described plant nerd, so the classification of living things is something I deal with every day and am fascinated by.)
Yoon writes about the human “umwelt”, or the world as it is experienced by a particular organism. Humans across the globe and across the ages have classified living organisms in an astonishingly similar fashion. We seem to have an instinctive way of seeing and understanding relationships between living things and classifying them accordingly.
From the time that human infants can understand the world around them they begin classifying. An example of this is the almost universal obsession among young children with naming dinosaurs. As a species we appear to have a natural affinity for trying to order the natural world.
The style of this classification is so similar across cultures and across time that the reader, given a list of animal names from the Huambisa dialect of the Peruvian rainforest, is remarkably able to identify which names are birds and which are fish! Likewise, when given illustrations of two imaginary simple lifeforms and two imaginary names for those lifeforms, over 90% of people will assign the names the same way.
There is evidence that there might be a part of the brain specifically designed for classifying living things. Those who suffer injury to certain distinct parts of the brain become unable to identify living things, while still being able to identify non-living objects.
Yoon follows the timeline of binomial nomenclature, from Linnaeus to the present, and documents how it has changed over time away from the instinctive and into the mathematical/scientific. She argues that this progression has taken classification of living things out of the territory of the “armchair naturalist” and into the that of the professional taxonomist, thus removing us from involvement in understanding relationships between living organisms, including ourselves. Yoon argues that in doing so we have lost something invaluable. While primitive hunter/gathers, subsistence farmers, hikers, birders, gardeners, hunters, and fisherman can still see the living world and articulate its order, most of us have re-directed our natural classification instinct to the ordering and naming of branded merchandise rather than living things.
In Yoon’s words: “We have nearly lost the language of life. The umwelt is not merely a means of taxonomizing. It is what allows us to make our way, confidently, sensibly, and happily, in the world every day. Without the power to recognize – to see, order, and name life – we simply would not know how to live in our world and understand it.”

[Savannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book because Why Fish Don't Exist, one of my favorite books of 2021, cited it as an important source. It was interesting but mostly just okay. I feel like Yoon's insistence on the umwelt got heavy-handed and repetitive throughout the book. She also applied it to race towards the end which is extremely ahistorical and annoying, though I suppose back in 2009 the historical construction of race was not as widely known (in some circles) as it is now. I don't think it makes sense to blame our disconnection from the living world on taxonomy becoming more rational and scientific (thus losing the umvelt) - we didn't lose our umvelt because science became more rational, but because we no longer directly engage with the natural world for survival (though our survival still depends on it).

What did I take from this book? There's a portion of the brain used to order living things that is separate from that which orders inanimate things (which we know from patients with localized brain damage). Supposedly brands/logos have replaced living things in our umwelt and I'd be interested to see if those same patients would struggle with logos or not.

The ending anecdote about the orca was lovely. I too used to feel that disconnection from nature when I was right in it, and she's right, it's never too late to get in touch with your umwelt.

The history of taxonomy was interesting to read about but probably not something I'll carry with me.