Not all will know, however, that he was also a political activist and pamphleteer. And he was a member of the London Corresponding Society, a radical club dedicated to furthering the rights of man. Parkinson is perhaps the only contributor to neuropathology to have been arrested for alleged involvement in a plot to murder a reigning monarch.
What is disappointing in this book is that so few of the essayists chose to explain precisely how proper names got attached to the various parts, processes and pathologies. Frank Clifford Rose tells us, for example, that it was the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot who called Parkinson's 'shaking palsy' la maladie de Parkinson — although it may be added that Charcot then went on to stake his own claim to be the definitive codifier of the disorder.
But in most cases we are left in the dark. Was it mainly disciples who affixed the label? What was in it, we might ask, for the nominator? And did not endless priority and property disputes then flare up, which would have made fascinatingly unedifying reading? Poor old Horner! But all this comes in scraps. What a shame that the machiavellian workings of linguistic imperialism in medical science are not addressed head-on in a book that, for all its merits, fails to see the historical wood for the trees.
This was because, as I was learning, language was a tool we used to navigate the world but was not the world itself. I learned very quickly that no two biologists could agree on how many trout there were.
In my youth, I learned to identify things using field guides, in which a picture of a bird or an insect corresponds to a name on the facing page.
I had assumed that these books contained the last word, that the names for every organism had been agreed upon by figures of authority. In the beginning of Genesis, God makes things by drawing lines—separating the once-holistic universe into pieces. He divides light from dark, land from water. He gives names to entities that did not exist before— day , night , Heaven , Earth. He creates whales from the water, birds from the sky, and Adam, the first human, from the soil.
Thus, the first human becomes a creator in his own right—naming things into being. But what might we have lost in the process? The author Ursula K. In it, Eve apparently senses that once Adam put names on the animals, her relationship to them, and theirs to one another, changes; some ineffable and sensual closeness has vanished. So, she goes through the garden unnaming them. I first traveled to Pohnpei, a tiny island in Micronesia only 13 miles in diameter , in March , to write about a clan of people called the Lasialap, for whom the eel is a totem.
Members of the eel clan consider eels to be their human ancestors and therefore do not eat them. In the Lasialap reality, humans can seamlessly transform into eels and back into humans, sometimes becoming a hybrid version of both at once. I learned on this first trip to Pohnpei that the people have many fascinating customs related to naming, particularly the naming of plants, so I returned several years later to conduct research for a book about naming and ordering nature. Names are a source of power in Pohnpei.
Medicine men and women are able to activate and harness the healing powers of a plant by uttering special names that only they know. THERE is a general agreement among the different languages in naming large numbers up to and including one million, that is, 1,, or 10 6. But one enters the tower of Babel looking for the name of 1,,, or 10 9.
In the United States it is known as one billion, in France as un trillion, in Germany as eine Milliarde, and in Russia as odin milliard. Great Britain, Italy and Spain have no special name for that number since the British billion, the Italian bilione, and the Spanish bicuento mean 1,,,, or 10 This fact causes great inconvenience, because in modern science a great many things are measured in the 10 9 unit.
This includes the age of the universe expressed in years , the cosmic distances expressed in light years , the temperatures during the early stages of the universal evolution and inside of the exploding stars expressed in degrees Kelvin , and the energies of modern particle accelerators expressed in electron volts. Department of Physics and Astrophysics, University of Colorado.
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar. 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 This is an interesting book. 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? 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. 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.
Sep 22, George rated it liked it Shelves: evolution. 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 blami 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.
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". Jul 21, Kathy rated it really liked it. 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.
An organism creates and reshapes its own umwelt when it interacts with the world. This is termed a 'functional circle'. Th 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.
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. Wilson and the different types of taxonomy as they were developed through the years.
Science lovers would enjoy this book. Aug 04, Michael rated it liked it Shelves: nonfiction-read. 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 taxono 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.
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.
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