Taxonomy: what's in a name? Doesn't a rose by any other name smell as sweet?

Carl Linnaeus, also known as Carl von Linne (Carolus Linnaeus) was born May 23, 1707 and lived to January 10, 1778. Linnaeus was a Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist who laid the foundations for the modern scheme of nomenclature and, not coincidentally, is also considered one of the founders of modern ecology; he is known as the “father of modern taxonomy.” He was the son and grandson of churchmen and raised to be a minister, but early in his life he decided that botany was more interesting. After doing research on the sexual reproduction of plants, he decided to attend medical school, eventually rising to the Chair of Medicine and then the Chair of Botany at Uppsala University. Whether he realized it or not, his desire was to organize things – plants, animals, even minerals. He liked things “neat” and he was not satisfied with the unwieldy names used at that time for biological entities (“Physalis annua ramosissima, ramis angulosis glabris, foliis dentato-serratis” do not exactly roll off the tongue). He brilliantly and consistently applied to all sorts of living things what we call “binomial nomenclature,” a system that had been developed by Gaspard (or Caspar) and Johann Bauhin almost 200 years earlier, but Linnaeus used it consistently. It is a “neat” system, and a useful one. For example, there are more than 800 000 recognized species of insects on earth, more than all the other plants and animals combined. Of these 800 000, nearly half are beetles; thus, one fifth of the 1.5 million recognized species are beetles! As J.B.S. Haldane said, “God has an inordinate fondness for beetles.” How to sort out all this? Linnaeus showed us the way.