"Anchoring Biodiversity Information: From Sherborn to the 21st century and
beyond"
Friday October 28th 2011
Flett Theatre, The Natural History Museum, London, UK
details:
http://www.linnean.org/fileadmin/events2/events.php?detail=273
This is going to feature a history of science talk:
"Naming and Necessity: Sherborn's Context in the late 19th Century"
Gordon McOuat
History of Science and Technology Programme
University of King's College
Halifax, NS CANADA
[log in to unmask]
By the late 19th Century, storms plaguing early Victorian systematics and
nomenclature seemed to have abated. Vociferous disputes over radical
renaming, the world shaking clash of all-encompassing procrustean systems,
struggles over centres of authority, and the issues of language and meaning
had now been settled by the institution of a stable imperial Museum and its
catalogues, a set of Rules for the naming of zoological objects, and a new
professional class of zoologists. Yet, for all that tranquility, the
disputes simmered below the surface, re-emerging as bitter struggles over
synonyms, trinomials, the subspecies category, the looming issues of the
philosophy of scientific language, and the aggressive new American style of
field biology - all pressed in upon the received practice of naming and
classifying organisms and the threat of anarchy. In the midst rose an
index. This paper will explore the context of CD Sherborn's Index Animalium
and those looming problems and issues which a laborious and comprehensive
"index of nature" was meant to solve.
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