Ordering Life: Karl Jordan and the Naturalist Tradition

Conclusion

Conclusion More than four decades would pass between Jordan’s last scientific publication , “A Contribution to the Taxonomy of Stenoponia, a Genus of Palaearctic and Nearctic Fleas” (1958), and the call by the All Species Foundation (ASF) in 2000 to finally complete the catalog of life within twenty-five years. As a taxonomist who described, alone or with a coauthor, 3,426 species of insects, Karl Jordan would seem to have brought taxonomists precisely (and only) 3,426 steps closer to the ASF’s goal. We can now address the astonishment expressed by the founders of the ASF that the catalog of life was not yet completed. By looking at the life and context of a taxonomist who for seven decades described thousands of species, we can ask what allowed him to describe those 3,426 species and what prevented him from describing more. In other words, taking as examples the various groups on which Jordan worked, how do we know what we know about biodiversity? Why, conversely, do we seem to know so little? And furthermore, what precisely are we counting as knowledge, either possessed or desired? First, why could Jordan describe the species he did? At the most foundational level, a robust naturalist tradition valued by a certain strata of society supported his work. That tradition meant that a child interested in beetles might respectably pursue that interest along certain lines outlined by generations of naturalists. For a young German teenager in the 1870s, this could even mean earning a university degree in disciplines devoted to the study of the living world, in large part due to the role of natural history in the grand intellectual project of understanding the natural world. This particular young naturalist’s contacts with professors of forestry hinted that this project could have an economic component as well, once “grand intellectual projects” were simply not good enough. Meanwhile, the presence of mentors committed to a certain way of doing natural history proved enormously important. Jordan lived in a world in which science was valued as a part of elite culture, and taxonomy—at least done a certain way—counted as part of science. Critics existed, to be sure, inspiring much of the “how to do entomology” debates that Jordan encountered upon arriving in Britain. But as a student, Jordan learned that the facts of biological diversity, and natural history collections, mattered. Museum curation and describing new species, so long as one did these tasks well and in the context of a broader quest, could be combined with Jordan’s strong sense of identity as an academically trained scientist. One of the defining factors in Jordan’s experience in the naturalist tradition, and one that made his life seem ideal to other taxonomists, was his position as curator of insects at one of the largest private natural history museums in the world. Jordan could not only survive doing taxonomy, he could pursue a respectable , middle-class existence. This brings us to one of the most important determinants of Jordan’s ability; namely, concrete financial support. Indeed, Jordan’s position as a curator governed by a patron’s wishes may in fact have led him to describe more species than he would have liked. By virtue of the task given him by Walter Rothschild, he found hundreds of previously undescribed species of beetles in Rothschild’s cabinets. He could ultimately justify the time spent composing the resulting descriptions by appealing to the importance of taxonomy to biology. As he often pointed out, an accurate understanding of relationships, and therefore the origin of species, depended on a knowledge of those species, and the more species one knew, the better one could check generalizations . Concentrated wealth proved crucial to this project, for it ensured that Jordan could deliver, at least for a time, on the ideals he outlined for those species to be described well. Rothschild could pay Jordan’s way as he visited collections on the Continent to compare type specimens, buy any book desired in order to amass the literature required to deal with the nomenclatural windmills , purchase specimens, and fund expeditions. Access to Rothschild’s wealth ensured that when Jordan did name and describe species, those determinations could be reliable. Under such ideal circumstances, Jordan’s famous caution in the name of good science need not become a liability, nor prevent the con- fidence required to coin each new name. It meant Jordan could describe new species within the context of unprecedented...