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Sweden: The Swede Who Named the Natural World
Description
Why did a restless boy from a rural Swedish parsonage end up giving a name to every living thing on Earth — and how did he build a system so durable that it still runs as the operating system of modern biology, long after the theology behind it was overturned? How did the invention of the index card, a near-fatal journey through Lapland, and three years in the Dutch botanical gardens produce twelve thousand species names and a framework that has since scaled to potentially a trillion? And what do we do with the fact that the same man who placed humans in the animal kingdom also used his taxonomic authority to give scientific credibility to racial hierarchy?
Join John and a special co-host as they tell the story of Sweden and Carl Linnaeus — the apostles he sent around the world, the specimens that ended up in Piccadilly, and the system that names everything...
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