Ordering Life: Karl Jordan and the Naturalist Tradition

Introduction

Introduction In the spring of 2000, a group of technology leaders gathered at a dinner party in San Francisco. Flush with money from the technology boom, former Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold wished to discuss what sorts of projects needed funding. Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired magazine joined in, as did Stewart Brand, the creator of The Whole Earth Catalog. During the course of the evening, Kelly suggested supporting a global inventory of all living animals and plants, but the group assumed it was already being done. After all, the task had been mentioned in the first pages of Genesis, no less. Yet the group soon found that not only did the global biological inventory remain unfinished but those who had given themselves the task—taxonomists— had completed only 1.5 to 30 percent of the job (depending on one’s estimate of the number of creatures living on the planet). Having discovered these shocking facts, Kelly and others founded the All Species Foundation (ASF). The foundation ’s goal can be simply stated: catalog and describe every species on Earth within twenty-five years. They formulated the project, not surprisingly, with modern technology in mind, imagining a Web page devoted to each species. Proponents estimated that completing the list would require around $20 billion . Some of the biggest names in biology signed on to the project, including Edward O. Wilson of Harvard and Peter Raven of the Missouri Botanical Garden .1 Ultimately, the dot-com bust ended the ASF’s extraordinarily ambitious project. But its founders’ confrontation with the state of the “catalog of life” on this planet raises important questions about the status of the primary scientific tradition to which anyone with such goals must turn: the naturalist tradition, and, more specifically, the endeavor of taxonomy (taxonomy is here used interchangeably with the term systematics). In their astonishment that a world inventory had not yet been done, Kelly and his colleagues must have been wondering what taxonomists—those who name, describe, and classify living beings—had 2 ordering life been doing with all their time and resources. Hadn’t they been working on the “global biological inventory” (albeit under different names) since at least the eighteenth century? And didn’t they have gigantic institutions—natural history museums—in every national capital in which to complete the project? After all, how difficult could naming organisms be? In other words, the ASF’s vision highlights an interesting problem concerning the study of biodiversity; namely, how do we know what we know about biodiversity and, conversely, why do we seem to know so little? Traditions by definition have histories. To help answer these questions in a historical way, this book takes the life and work of the entomologist Karl Jordan as a guide through the history of the naturalist tradition in the twentieth century . Jordan spent nearly seven decades endeavoring to name, describe, and order a small subset of the world’s biodiversity. As a curator of insects employed first by Walter Rothschild’s zoological museum in Tring, England, and then by the Natural History Museum in London, he described 2,575 species of Coleoptera , Lepidoptera, and Siphonaptera as well as another 851 species while working with Walter or Charles Rothschild. He thus would seem to have brought us a few steps closer to the fulfillment of the ASF’s goal. The total number (3,426 species), while impressive, amounts to about 0.3 percent of the known animal world. Examining the backstory of that number provides a fascinating entree into the complex reasons for why completing the inventory of our planet’s biodiversity remains elusive. The fact that Jordan’s works were (and still are) praised as models of taxonomic investigation (one lepidopterist remembers that when Jordan visited the halls of the Natural History Museum in London as an old man in the 1950s, one did not say hello to him: “You sort of clicked your heels and stood at attention!”)2 is an important element of why in these chapters he is chosen as a guide. For this book ultimately asks, how and in what kind of environment could Jordan do work that others found so impressive and sound? What prevented him from doing more? Using Jordan as a guide through the taxonomic wing of the naturalist tradition, one can examine the various opportunities and challenges confronting those working to describe, order, and explain biodiversity in the twentieth century. As...