Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life Roberts Jason (2024)

Every Living Thing tells the dramatic, globe-spanning and meticulously researched story of two scientific rivals and their race to survey all life on Earth. In the 18th century, Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a hucksters flair, believed life belonged in tidy, static categories, while Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of Frances royal garden, viewed it as a dynamic swirl of complexities. Both were stunned by the diversity of life and fell far short of their goal, but their work produced sharply divergent views of nature, humanitys role in shaping the planets fate and humanity itself. Linnaeus and the explorer apostles he sent into the world introduced concepts such as mammal, primate and Homo sapiens, while also promoting racist pseudo-science. Buffon coined the term reproduction, anticipated ideas about evolution and genetics, and argued against prejudice. Drawing on more than a decade of research, Jason Roberts traces their rivalry, discoveries and enduring legacies across three centuries.