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Every Living Thing by Jason Roberts
English | 2024 | ISBN: 1529400465 | 432 pages | PDF | 26 Mb
An epic, extraordinary account of scientific rivalry and obsession in the quest to survey all of life on Earth-a competition whose consequences still reverberate today-from the bestselling author of A Sense of the World
"[A] vibrant scientific saga . . . at once important, outrageous, enlightening, entertaining, enduring, and still evolving."-Dava Sobel, author of Longitude
In the eighteenth century, two men-exact contemporaries and polar opposites-dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster's flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France's royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic swirl of complexities. Each began his task believing it to be difficult but not impossible: How could the planet...