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Linnaeus and the poetics of evolution


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ENDNOTES


1 Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999, pP4. Systema Natura (1735): "there are no new species (1); as like always gives birth to like (2); as one in each species was at the beginning of the progeny (3), it is necessary to attribute this progenitorial unity to some Omnipotent and Omniscient Being, namely God, whose work is called Creation. This is confirmed by the mechanism, the laws, principles, constitutions and sensations in every living individual." p18. By 1760, Linnaeus was willing to consider the possibility that "new species" might be "produced by hybrid generation.

2Furthermore, that control over the miniature seemed to be more than a refuge against modernity; it seemed to be the only adequate response.” Roberta McGrath ‘Looking for Life: Microscopy and Modernity’ in Seeing Her Sex: Medical Archives and the Female Body, p174.

3 Jan C. Westerhoff, ‘A World of Signs: Baroque Pansemioticism, the Polyhistor and the Early Modern Wunderkammer’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 62.4, 2001, p645.

4 He bequeathed it to St John's College (c1740), Geraldine Barnes, ‘Curiosity, Wonder, and William Dampier's Painted Prince’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 6.1 (2006) 31-50.

5 Geraldine Barnes, p34.

6 Lisbet Koerner, 1999.

7 Nicolas Malebranche, De la recherche de la vérité où l'on traite de la nature de l'esprit de l'homme..., (1674) ed. Geneviève Rodis-Lewis (Paris, 1965), XV. Quoted, Jan C. Westerhoff, 2001, p643. He developed Descartes’ ideas in line with standard Roman Catholic orthodoxy. Malebranche published major works on metaphysics, theology, and ethics, as well as studies of optics, the laws of motion and the nature of colour.

8 The new paradigm, called the non-equilibrium or hierarchical patch dynamics paradigm, recognises different kinds of change are contingent and active in ecological systems. See J. Wu & O.L. Loucks, ‘From balance of nature to hierarchical patch dynamics: A paradigm shift in ecology’, The Quarterly Review of Biology 70, p439-466, 1995.

9 William Holland Drury, Chance and Change: Ecology for Conservationists, John G.T. Anderson (Ed.), U of California P, 1998, p199.

10 Plato, Republic Bk 10, (605b2-5)

11 Antonio Damasio, Descartes' error: emotions, reason, and the human brain, New York: Avon Books, 1994, p 118. Gregory Ulmer wrote, ‘One of the most amazing events of this decade, from the poverty of poststructuralism, is the awarding of a Nobel Prize in Economics to the U of Chicago professor who demonstrated empirically that emotional factors prevent individuals from making economic decisions that reason would seem to dictate.’ Joseph Tabbi, ‘A Project for a New Consultancy’ interview with Gregory Ulmer’, Jan 1996, http://www.altx.com. [DL 34.8.1999]

12 Damasio argues that feeling is, “the realisation of a nexus between an object and an emotional body state.” 1994, p132. See also, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999; Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991. George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. How metaphors for embodied interactions with the world are the sources of higher-level representations of language and thought (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson); The fact that robotocists (e.g. Rodney Brooks learning from Damasio, Lakoff, and Johnson) have made situatedness and embodiment, the two fundamental principles of constructing humanoid robots. Rodney Brooks, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us, New York: Pantheon, 2002.

13 Abner Shimony, ‘One source of richness is the simultaneous involvement of several sense. Another is the array of ‘higher order variables of stimulus’’, such as spatial and temporal gradients, which are capable of conveying decisive information. Finally, in ordinary situations there are usually opportunities for exploration, by motion of the organism as a whole or by movements of the eyes, hands, and head, for the purpose of bringing small cues into prominence and achieving new perspectives.’ Abner Shimony, ‘Is Observation Theory-Laden? A Problem in Naturalistic Epistemology’ in R.G. Colodny, Ed. Logic, Laws, and Life, Pittsburgh UP, 1977, p196.

14 Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason, Uni of Chicago Press, 1987, p209. As he puts it, we are: ‘weaving together the threads of our lives. In order for us to have coherent experiences, to make any sense at all of what happens to us, to survive in our environment, and to enhance the quality of our lives, we must organize and reorganize our experiences from moment to moment.’ Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993, p152. An ecological approach appreciates the feedback and interrelationships between culture, biology, behaviour, and biological evolution - exemplified by Tim Ingold: ‘What we need, instead, is a quite different way of thinking about organisms and their environments. I call this 'relational thinking'. It means treating the organism not as a discrete, pre-specified entity but as a particular locus of growth and development within a continuous field of relationships. It is a field that unfolds in the life activities of organisms and that is enfolded (through processes of embodiment or enmindment) in their specific morphologies, powers of movement and capacities of awareness and response.’Tim Ingold, ‘From Complementarity to Obviation: On Dissolving the Boundaries Between Social and Biological Anthropology, Archaeology and Psychology', Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 123, 1988, p43.

15 Though in themselves the sounds of language are meaningless, they can be recombined in different ways to yield thousands of words, each distinct in meaning.... In just the same way, a finite stock of words... can be combined to produce an infinite number of sentences. Nothing remotely like this is found in animal communication. Derek Bickerton, Language and Species, Chicago, IL University of Chicago, 1990 p15-16. Joseph Catalano stresses the use of convention itself, ‘The world of artefacts had already made things exist ‘by convention.’ All artefacts are conventional, or arbitrary, because they involve a use of matter arising from human intentions.’ ‘Coulmas's point is valid, but it has to be put in proper perspective. The move from mnemonic devices to numbers and from pictures to pictograms established a distinctive kind of convention, but not convention itself.’ Joseph Catalano, Thinking Matter: Consciousness... Routledge, 2000, p53. Jonathan Culler, ‘If a cave man is successfully to inaugurate language by making a special grunt signifying 'food,' we must suppose that the grunt is already distinguished from other grunts and that the world has already been divided into the categories 'food' and 'non-food’.' Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982, p96

16 , an 'infinite use of finite means.' Herder thought language and thought are inseparable. John Zammito thinks Herder was as important a philosopher as his teacher, Kant, though ‘the pre-critical Kant’ prior to the first Critique of 1781 was similar. Herder later criticised Kant for ignoring language and artificially creating dichotomies in the mind. John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002.

17 Noam Chomsky, On Nature and Language. Cambridge University Press, 2002, p24.

18Modern humans, especially those after 50,000 years ago, learned how to overcome those evolutionary constraints by exploiting material culture, by telling stories, and performing rituals as a means to offload and provide cognitive anchors for ideas that have no natural home within the evolved mind. In this regard, the modern brain is unlikely to be significantly different from that of a Neanderthal. But it is linked into the world of human culture that augments and extends its powers in remarkable ways.’ Steven Mithen, "The Evolution of Imagination: An Archaeological Perspective," SubStance 30 (2001): 28-54 . 2001, p51.

19 Herbert Simon also points out the modalities: ‘But there is more to dogs than just recognizing them. One has also stored in memory a large body of information about dogs ... On the basis of this knowledge one can form expectations and predictions about a dog's behaviour. One has not only knowledge and beliefs about dogs, but feelings as well.’ Simon goes on to mention all the expressions and names that ‘dog’ dogs. Herbert Simon, ‘Literary Criticism: A Cognitive Approach’ from Bridging the Gap: Where Cognitive Science Meets Literary Criticism: A special issue edited by Stefano Franchi and Güven Güzeldere, The Stanford Humanities Review, Vol 4, No1. http://shr.stanford.edu:80/shreview/4-1/text/toc.html [DL 28.1.2002] Antonio Damasio writes: ‘By object I mean entities as diverse as a person, a place, a melody, a toothache, a state of bliss; by image, I mean a mental pattern in any of the sensory modalities, e.g. a sound image, a tactile image, the image of a state of well-being. Such images convey aspects of the physical characteristics of the object and they may also convey the reaction of like or dislike one may have for an object, the plans one may formulate for it, or the web of relationships of that object among other objects. Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, Random House, 2000, p9. Simon, a Nobel Laureate in economics, began in political science and became interested in the psychology of problem solving. His interest in cognitive science stems from his criticism of economists’ assumption of ‘economic man’, an excessively rational animal. The term stored is dangerous in suggesting memory traces- as Dennett notes, ‘The consensus of cognitive science...is that over there we have the long-term memory...and over here we have the workspace or working memory, where the thinking happens.... And yet there are no two places in the brain to house these two facilities. The only place in the brain that is a plausible home for either of these separate functions is the whole cortex - not two places side by side but one large place.’ Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1992, p270-271. Rosenfield looks at globally brain-damaged people, memory loss is not destruction of a ‘memory trace’ but a restructuring of the brain. Consciousness is the act of sense-making; brain-damaged patients exhibit ‘a breakdown in the mechanisms of consciousness. A patient's state of confusion is no more to be ignored than his failure to recognize, say, his home. Memory, recognition, and consciousness are all part of the same process.’p35 Conscious memory states require ‘a dynamic organization that, given the complexity of the processes (the immediate, the past, and self-reference), are not reproducible.’ Israel Rosenfield, The Strange, Familiar, and Forgotten: An Anatomy of Consciousness, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1992, p129. Clancey comments, ‘Again, neural structures coordinating what we say, imagine, feel, and how we move are activated ‘in place,’ as we are in the process of speaking, feeling, moving. Saying that some memories are forgotten and others recalled suggests a process of search and matching for relevancy; instead, the brain directly reorganizes itself on a global basis, not merely filtering or ‘reinterpreting’ sensations, but physically recoordinating how perception and conceptualization occur.’ W.J. Clancey, ‘The biology of consciousness: Comparative review of Israel Rosenfield, The Strange, Familiar, and Forgotten: An anatomy of Consciousness and Gerald M. Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind’, Artificial Intelligence 60, 1991, p313-356.

20 Mark Turner, from a linguistic, English literature and cognitive science background, echoes the point that a familiar concept like ‘horse’ requires input from multiple sensory domains to construct the movements, sounds, emotive significance with its signature feel and smell, pictures and arbitrary symbols like ‘horse’. Mark Turner, The Literary Mind, OUP, 1996. p111. He notes that ‘blending is already involved in our most unitary and literal... conception of basic physical objects, such as horse and horn, and in our most unitary and literal... conception of small spatial stories, such as horse moves and horn impales.’ p112. Turner argues that, ‘Meanings are . . . rather complex operations of projection, binding, linking, blending, and integration over multiple spaces . . . meaning is parabolic and literary.’

21 Mark Turner, 1996, p110.

22 Israel Rosenfield, The Strange, Familiar, and Forgotten: An anatomy of Consciousness, Alfred A. Knopf, 1992, p82.

23Far from being merely a matter of words, metaphor is a matter of thought - all kinds of thought: thought about emotion, about society, about human character, about language, and about the nature of life and death. It is indispensable not only to our imagination but also to our reason.’ George Lakoff and Mark Turner, Preface, More than Cool Reason: a Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

24 George Lakoff & Mark Turner, 1989, p214.

25 He then thought that to prevent confusion people had come to agree what to name things, but it is not clear whether this is a natural process or by rational thought. Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, Blackwell, 1995, p88.

26 See Peter J. Finch, John Dee: the world of an Elizabethan Magus, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972. And Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution, (1965) OUP, 1996.

27 Quoted by Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, Blackwell, 1995p 187

28 Sir Thomas Urguhart(1611–1660) was the only seventeenth century thinker who based the project of a universal language on phonograms. According to Urquhart, every letter of every word in his project of a universal language was to express a defined idea. Thus the meaning of the concrete word would already be present in its written form. See his boom, Logopandecteision or an Introduction to the Universal Language.

29 See Marion Wynne-Davies, Ed. The Renaissance from 1500 to 1660, Bloomsbury, 1992.

30 Umberto Eco, ‘For a Polyglot Federation’, New Perspectives Quarterly, Winter 1993

31Once we had to impart our worlds through the work of writing or telling, and we had to gather our worlds laboriously from the promptings of writing and our fund of experiences and recollections. Now information is handed to us as readily available sounds and sights. Engagement with the world has been yielding to the consumption of news and entertainment commodities.’ Albert Borgmann, ‘The Moral Significance of the Material Culture’ in Technology and the Politics of Knowledge, Ed., Andrew Feenberg and Alastair Hannay, Indiana UP, 1995, p90.

32 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minnesota UP, 1991, p52.

33 See David Rosenberg, ‘Early Modern Information Overload’, Journal of the History of Ideas, V64:1, 2003, p7. For the latter two the ‘information overload’ refers principally to books; Sheehan refers to an increase in descriptive facts.

34Historia Naturalis” (Natural History), an encyclopaedia of natural science that spanned thirty-seven books. Pliny describes in detail the physical nature of the world. It includes books on geography, anthropology, zoology, botany, and the medicinal uses of plants. Much of its importance lies in the way Pliny organized previously random facts and spotted important details which had been ignored by others.

35 Anna Pavord, The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants, Bloomsbury, 2005.

36 John Ray wrote, ‘How variously is the Surface of it [the earth] distinguished into Hills, and Valleys, and Plains, and high Mountains affording pleasant Prospects? John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation, London: S. Smith, 1691, p63. Starting in 1660 with his Catalogue of Cambridge Plants, and ending with the posthumous publication of Synopsis Methodica Avium et Piscium in 1713, Ray published systematic works on plants, birds, mammals, fish, and insects, in which he brought order to the chaotic mass of names in use by the naturalists of his time. Like Linnaeus, Ray searched for the "natural system," a classification of organisms that would reflect the Divine Order of creation. Unlike Linnaeus, whose plant classification was based entirely on floral reproductive organs, Ray classified plants by overall morphology: the classification in his 1682 book Methodus Plantarum Nova draws on flowers, seeds, fruits, and roots. Ray's plant classification system was the first to divide flowering plants into monocots and dicots. This method produced more "natural" results than "artificial" systems based on one feature alone; it expressed the similarities between species more fully. Ray's system greatly influenced later botanists such as Jussieu and de Candolle, and systems based on total morphology came to replace systems based on only one feature or organ system.

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39 For example, from the 1660s, the salons of Paris began a passion for conversation that Harold Nicolson developed the new conceptions of ‘reason and ‘nature’, of ‘free thought’ were sifted codified, and eventually imposed.’ Harold Nicolson, The Age of Reason, Panther, 1968, p291.The salons broke down divisions between aristocracy and intellectuals and gender. Madame de Rambouillet, began the trend and insisted on god elegant conversation. From 1750 the work of the encyclopaedists were central to the themes and issues. Good conversation gave rise to the art of letter writing, Byron and Horace Walpole. Bernard de Fontenelle (1657-1757) promulgated rationalism against superstition primarily through his conversation. Romantic writers would later praise conversation for quite different reasons. De Quincey wrote, ‘I felt... that in the electric kindling of life between two minds... there sometimes arise glimpses and shy revelations of affinity, suggestion, relation, analogy, that could not have been approached through any avenues of methodological study.’ De Quincey, The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, Ed. David Masson, 1896, vol x, A. and C. Black, 1889-90, p268.

40 J. Paul Hunter Before Novels: the cultural contexts of eighteenth-century English fiction, WW Norton, 1990, p201-3. Hunter posits such thinking with the beginnings of the novel, ‘It is no accident that journalism and the novel - as well as the adventurous spirit and preoccupation with the epithanic moment of discovery that sponsored both - got their impetus primarily from Protestantism in general and Dissent in particular.’ P199. Hunter’s thesis is that the novel emerged from a varied discursive environment rather than being a bastard offspring of romances.

41 Swinnock concludes, ‘Reader, I have now ended the Treatise, but whether thou (if a stranger to this calling) wilt put an end to thy carnal fleshly ways, and begin this high and heavenly work or no, I know not. (p868/9).

42 Edward Bury, The Husbandsman’s Companion of 1677 (British Library Accession No. 1019) ‘Upon worms in the garden, When I was digging in the garden, I observed many worms and other insects which divine providence had there disposed to be fed and cherished, but by what I know not... then he thinks ‘ what a poor miserable piece man is.’ (p70); Upon a garden spoiled through bad fence; Upon a mole spoiling the garden [he’d fixed his fence], ‘when we have the greatest expectation we meet the greatest disappointment.’; Upon sympathy and antipathy of vegetables; Upon the painted butterfly ‘Lord keep me humble, make me sincere, and help me to be diligent, so shall I be happy for ever.’; Upon the pleasures of a garden. It seemed to be an earthly paradise... my affections were much tickled with it (p207); Upon a heap of ants or pismires; Upon a snail; Upon leaves falling in autumn; Upon the many enemies fruit trees have.’

43 It is often forgotten that Kepler had trained as a priest and was a devout Lutheran. His mother was imprisoned for witchcraft and he was the court astrologer yet thought empirical data important. Newtown entered Cambidge 1660 to study theology and was an alchemist.

44 See Martin Fitzpatrick, ‘Joseph Priestley and the Millennium’ in RGW Anderson & Christopher Lawrence Eds, Science, Medicine and Dissent, Wellcome Trust/Science Museum, London, 1982. He recommends electrical experiments as being ‘of all others, the cleanest, the most elegant, that the compass of philosophy exhibits’ and noted the power of electrical performers, ‘So far are philosophers from laughing to see the astonishment of the vulgar at these experiments.’ Quoted in Simon Schaffer, ‘Priestley and the Millennium’ p40-41, in Anderson & Lawrence ibid. Whereas, Pepys a keen member of the Royal Society, recorded Charles II ‘mightily laughed’ when hearing that scientists were ‘spending time only in weighing air’. (Probably Boyle’s experiments on pressures of gas). John Carey, The Faber Book of Science
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