I am interested in 18th century natural philosophy, science, particularly botany, the study of hybridity in plants and animals, which, of course, then allows me to consider the hybridity of language.
I was the kind of kid who liked omnivorously almost all kinds of science - rock collections, fossils - and I like leaves, I like plants, and I like biology.
One thing scientists do is to find order among a large number of facts, and one way to do that across fields as diverse as biology, geology, physics and astronomy is through classification.
Without computers, in the 17th century, we could classify the entire animal kingdom... there was this idea of the speciation, right? And now, all a search engine is is essentially the mathematical speciation of ideas - and these things really derive from the way that language is used and the way words relate.
Fragments of the natural method must be sought with the greatest care. This is the first and last desideratum among botanists. Nature makes no jumps. [Natura non facit saltus] All taxa show relationships on all sides like the countries on a map of the world.
The science of systematics has long been affected by profound philosophical preconceptions, which have been all the more influential for being usually covert, even subconscious.
I got interested in palaeontology and vertebrate history - sparked by books on human evolution - then vertebrate evolution. Studying with palaeontologists kindled my interest in fieldwork.
Scientists have egos, and scientists like to name dinosaurs. They like to name anything. Everybody likes to have their own animal that they named.
I decided that my means were sufficient to enable me to devote myself to botany, a determination which I never, during the long period of my subsequent career, had on any occasion any reason to repent of.
Whenever one reads of the determination of the species, or opens a book on natural science and history, in whatever language, one inevitably comes across the name of Linne.
Taxonomy (the science of classification) is often undervalued as a glorified form of filing-with each species in its folder, like a stamp in its prescribed place in an album; but taxonomy is a fundamental and dynamic science, dedicated to exploring the causes of relationships and similarities among organisms. Classifications are theories about the basis of natural order, not dull catalogues compiled only to avoid chaos.
Discovering new species is a passion. A day without collecting plants is painful for me.
I started out wanting to be a naturalist. My obsession in my youth was with bird-watching. I collected things, I spent a lot of time outdoors. I only vaguely realized that science was a little more than natural history, but by then I was hooked.
In science, we take large numbers of disparate facts and reduce them to see patterns. We use the patterns to reduce the amount of information. It's the reason we name species and genera and families in biology. It's also the reason we have names for certain types of geological features and so on in other fields.
The thing I'm particularly interested in is natural history. In its heyday, the mid- and late-nineteenth century, when people were going out and gathering the first huge caches of data and trying to understand what was living and growing everywhere, there was such a sense of freshness to that pursuit. It's very exciting.
I believe that natural history has lost much by the vague general treatment that is so common.
