Order in Nature
Year of Discovery: 1735
What Is It? All living plants and animals can be grouped and organized into a
simple hierarchy.
Who Discovered It? Carl Linnaeus
Why Is This One of the 100 Greatest?
Until the eighteenth century, nature was viewed as a wild profusion of life. Carl Linnaeus
discovered order and organization in that seeming randomness. His system for naming, grouping, and conceptually organizing plants and animals provided insights into botany, biology,
ecosystems, and biological structure that scientists still rely on almost 300 years later.
For his discovery, Carl Linnaeus is called the father of modern taxonomy. (“Taxonomy” is
Greek for “naming in order.”) The proof of his influence over, and importance to, modern science can be seen in two ways. First, all of science still uses his system and still uses Latin names
for existing and new species as Linnaeus did—the last vestige of that ancient language once the
universal language of science. Every newly discovered species is immediately classified and
named according to Linnaeus’s system. Second, every biologist has used Linnaeus’s system to
organize, understand, identify, and refer to every plant and animal species.
Linnaeus was the first to identify humans as homo sapiens and place humans in the
greater flow of life as part of the primate order. His classification system was the origin of
the concept of a “tree of life” since every living thing belonged to a species, genus, family,
class, order, and phyla and to the plant or animal kingdom—analogous to the twigs,
branches, and trunk of a tree.
How Was It Discovered?
Carl Linnaeus hated disorder. He claimed he could never understand anything that was
not systematically ordered. Born in Sweden in 1707, he was supposed to become a priest
like his father. But Carl showed little aptitude for, and no interest in, the priesthood and was
finally allowed to switch to medicine.
He entered the University of Lund’s School of Medicine in 1727 but spent more time
in the university’s small botanical garden than in class. Linnaeus had been fascinated by
plants and flowers since he was a small child. In 1728 Linnaeus transferred to the University
of Uppsala (partly because they had bigger botanical gardens). There he read a paper by
French botanist Sebastian Vaillant that claimed (it was considered shockingly revolution-
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