Episode Details

In 1735, a young Carl Linnaeus exposed the mayor of Hamburg's prized seven-headed hydra as a fake made of weasel jaws and snake skins, then fled the city to avoid the mayor's wrath. This deep dive follows how a boy nearly apprenticed to a shoemaker went on to build the architecture of modern biology.

We trace the family surname taken from a linden tree, the doctor who rescued his education, and the grueling Lapland expedition where a horse's jawbone sparked a new way of classifying life. We examine his quick Dutch doctorate, Systema Naturae, binomial names, the index card, and his apostles, along with the controversial way he classified humans and the tragic memory loss of his final years.

• Why long polynomial Latin descriptions made the old naming system chaotic
• How patronage from George Clifford of the Dutch East India Company fed his work
• His flip of the Celsius scale and his popularization of the male and female symbols
• How his views on breastfeeding are traced to the class name Mammalia
• The debate over his human subdivisions and whether they laid groundwork for pseudoscientific racism