13 Things That Don't Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time

by Michael Brooks

To understand why, we have to go back to 1758, when Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish naturalist, published the tenth edition of his revolutionary book, Systema natura. Linnaeus's volume did away with the simple but unenlightening system of his day for naming and grouping biological organisms. Instead, Linnaeus grouped organisms by their shared physical characteristics. In many ways he laid the groundwork for Charles Darwin; Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection also examined why different organisms should share certain physical characteristics and arrived at the conclusion that if things look alike they are probably related in some way. Suddenly we had the notion of a tree of life, and we could start to think about tracing our ancestors. Instead of everything having one (often very long) name, Linnaeus gave them two short ones. The first was its genus: Homo, for example. The second was the species, the subdivision that separates the members of a genus: sapiens, for example, or erectus. It was a neat system and is still biology's best. Though most of us are more familiar with gray wolf than Canis lupus, for some organisms Linnaeus's system provides the only familiar name: Tyrannosaurus rex, for example, or Escherichia (better known as E.) coli.