Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life

In the eighteenth century, two men—exact contemporaries and polar opposites—dedicated their lives to identifying and describing all life on Earth. Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish doctor, believed life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic French polymath and keeper of France's royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic swirl of complexities. Each began believing the task difficult but possible, assuming the planet held only a few thousand species. Both fell short of their goal, but articulated starkly divergent views on nature, the future of the Earth, and humanity. Linnaeus gave the world concepts like mammal, primate, and Homo sapiens, but denied that species change and promulgated racist pseudoscience. Buffon formulated early prototypes of evolution and genetics, warned of global climate change, and argued against prejudice. Their conflicting worldviews continued after their deaths as successors contended for dominance in the emerging science of biology. Jason Roberts traces the intertwined lives and legacies of Linnaeus and Buffon, along with the groundbreaking adventures of their acolytes, across three centuries to the present day.