原文开头
Carl Linnaeus— the father of the discipline, who had the gall to coin Homo sapiens— died in 1778, the slogan Deus creavit, Linnaeus disposuit (God created, Linnaeus organized) began to circulate. No one could say for certain whether it was a tribute or a dark joke, like naming a cathedral after its boastful janitor. Linnaeus’s successors knew they had their work cut out for them. André-Jean-Baptiste Robineau-Desvoidy, whose own unwieldy name perhaps prepared him for this kind of perversion, specialized in identifying flies, writing that “their complete definition will push human patience to its absolute limits.” He bestowed 248 different names on what turned out to be a single species. …
摘自《哈泼斯杂志》(Harper's Magazine)第353卷 第2115期 · 2026年8月刊,Dan Piepenbring。仅引用开头一小段供了解文章,版权归原刊所有,全文请阅读原刊。