Finding Order in Nature: The Naturalist Tradition from Linnaeus to E. O. Wilson by Paul Lawrence Farber

A brief primer on the history of natural history

Paul Lawrence Farber (1944–2021) was a professor of the history of science at Oregon State University. His specific area of interest was biology and natural history. His book Finding Order in Nature was first published in 1994. It relates how, over the course of about 250 years, the science of natural history progressed from the earliest efforts at species classification to the development of unified theories of life and the discovery of universal laws of nature.

Farber begins in the mid-18th century with the work of Sweden’s Carl Linnaeus and France’s Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, both of whom brought the classification of species to a systematic level that formed the foundation of modern natural history as we know it today. Many of the subsequent chapters revolve around conflicts of opposing views in the biological sciences: religious vs. secular views, form-ists (e.g. Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire) vs. function-ists (e.g. Georges Cuvier), experimental physiologists vs. collector/taxonomists, morphology vs. genetics. Of course, there’s a chapter on Charles Darwin, as well as those who championed his theory of evolution (e.g. Ernst Haeckel, Thomas Henry Huxley) and those who opposed it (e.g. Louis Agassiz, Richard Owen). As the subtitle indicates, the book ends with the recent work of E. O. Wilson, who pretty much gets a chapter all to himself.

This book is in Johns Hopkins University Press’s series Introductory Studies in the History of Science. The volumes in this series are deliberately intended to be brief overviews of their particular domains of science. Judging by Farber’s book alone, the only one I’ve read, these books are indeed introductory and written for students or other nonscientists. Finding Order in Nature runs about 200 pages. There are only about two or three footnotes per chapter and a bibliographic essay at the end. To me, this book reads as if it were meant to be a textbook for undergraduate students. The reading level is accessible enough, however, that it could even be used as a text for a high school course, if a course on such a subject existed.

I myself am not a scientist, but I read quite a few history books and biographies of naturalists. I like to live vicariously through their travels, researches, and discoveries. I was hoping that by reading this book I might discover some naturalists I’d never heard of and perhaps a few books I might want to pursue reading. The contents of Finding Order in Nature, however, were already largely familiar to me. In each of the book’s nine chapters, Farber covers two or three major players in natural history, and for the most part they are very well-known individuals. The most I got out of this was a few interesting biographical details on some of the scientists featured. I found a few titles of interest in the bibliographic essay, but the list of books is almost entirely comprised of secondary texts from the past fifty years rather than accounts written by the naturalists themselves.

That’s not to say that the book was a disappointment. I kind of knew what I was getting into when I bought it (as a Kindle Daily Deal). Farber accomplishes exactly what he set out to do. If I had read this book in my college days, it would have sparked my interest in natural history and given me a basic foundation for building further knowledge. At my present state of life and education, it was a brief and satisfying recap of a subject that I enjoy.