Linnaeus

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life, ideas and legacy of the pioneering Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707 - 1778). The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau once wrote: ‘Tell him I know no greater man on earth’. The son of a parson, Linnaeus grew up in an impoverished part of Sweden but managed to gain a place at university. He went on to transform biology by making two major innovations. He devised a simpler method of naming species and he developed a new system for classifying plants and animals, a system that became known as the Linnaean hierarchy. He was also one of the first people to grow a banana in Europe.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Staffan Muller-Wille No other episodes
  University Lecturer in History of Life, Human and Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge
• Stella Sandford No other episodes
  Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London
• Steve Jones 22 episodes
  Senior Research Fellow in Genetics at University College, London

Reading list

• The Compleat Naturalist
  Wilfrid Blunt (Frances Lincoln, 2004) Google Books →
• The Man Who Organized Nature: The Life of Linnaeus
  Gunnar Broberg (Princeton University Press, 2023) Google Books →
• In Worlds of Natural History
  HA Curry, N Jardine, JA Secord, and E Spary (eds.) (Cambridge University Press, 2018) Google Books →
• Sex, Botany and Empire: The Story of Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks
  Patricia Fara (Icon, 2017) Google Books →
• In Reproduction: Antiquity to the Present Day
  N Hopwood, R Flemming, and L Kassell (eds.) (Cambridge University Press, 2018) Google Books →
• Almost Like a Whale: The Origin Of Species Updated
  Steve Jones (Black Swan, 2000) Google Books →
• Linnaeus: Nature and Nation
  Lisbet Koerner (Harvard University Press, 1999) Google Books →
• Reason and Experience: The Representation of Natural Order in the Work of Carl Linnaeus
  James L. Larson (University of California Press, 1971) Google Books →
• Philosophia Botanica
  Carl Linnaeus (trans. Stephen Freer) (Oxford University Press, 2003) Google Books →
• Natural History and Information Overload: The Case of Linnaeus
  Staffan Muller-Wille and Isabelle Charmantier (Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2012)
• "A Great Complication of Circumstances" - Darwin and the Economy of Nature
  Trevor Pearce (Journal of the History of Biology, 2010)
• Linnaeus as ethnographer of Sami culture
  Nellejet Zorgdrager (Tijdschrift voor Skandinavistiek, 2008)

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Programme ID: m001l291

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001l291

Auto-category: 590 (Natural history and animals)