Louis Agassiz, the very famous Swiss geologist who by this point was teaching at Harvard, decided that the way that Harvard professors were teaching science was all wrong. LULU MILLER Yeah, it's this tiny, little horseshoe shaped island, an hour's ride away from the coast. He learns about a sort of camp for young natural historians, an island off of Massachusetts called Penikese. Is how this one guy, Werner Muensterberger, puts it that you can kind of become addicted to.īROOKE GLADSTONE In his early 20s, he is a perpetual student, he's also an educator. Each acquisition floods you with this sense of fantasized omnipotence. Often the habit will kick into gear after some sort of major deprivation or tragedy or trauma. But there are some people who've studied obsessive collectors. I don't want to go overly into like pathologizing, the very human impulse to collect and know our world. If he could just order the world, there was some sense of agency.
LULU MILLER Yeah, he talks about this urge even if he can't control the world, at least he had naming. He's drawing pine branches like anything he can get his hands on.īROOKE GLADSTONE Your theory is that he was trying to impose order on chaos. And right after that moment, he just goes back to drawing. His brother died when he was pretty young, and he had been very close with him. His neighbors called him shiftless and a ‘waster of time.’ Collecting got sort of a bad rap, and as he grew older, he just still loved doing it. There was this sense that the world was known.
Carl Linnaeus, the famous forefather of taxonomy, had published his Systema on Naturae, which was proposed to be this map of all life, properly arranged about a hundred years before. According to his accounts, taxonomy had sort of had its run. They were struggling to make, you know, ends meet and she told him to, quote, find something more relevant to do with his time. And she just thought, this is a waste of time. LULU MILLER So much sweaty, sweet, careful labor. And at one point, his mom just threw them away.īROOKE GLADSTONE His entire childhood was bound up in this stuff. He moved on to flowers and he started pinning them to the walls and writing their scientific names underneath them, making topographical maps of every place around him. He had all these questions about what he saw around him, and so first he started putting names to every star in the sky. LULU MILLER Yeah, he sort of woke into the world. So, like he's just a sweet loner.īROOKE GLADSTONE His Puritan parents, especially his mother, disapproved of his obsessions and his massive collections. When he gets bullied, he starts doing things alone, like trying to complete the task of clasping his hands and jump through them. LULU MILLER There are things that he does, especially when he's a kid that just make you fall in love with him. A hundred years later, that passion earned him a starring role in Miller's book, Why Fish Don't Exist A Story of Lost Love and the Hidden Order of Life. Jordan himself was obsessed with cataloging and ordering the world. Last year I spoke with Radiolab co-host Lulu Miller, who was struggling to impose order on her own life when she became obsessed with the 19th and 20th century taxonomist and natural historian David Starr Jordan. Of course, sometimes we go too far or in the wrong direction by imposing an artificial order based on irrelevant criteria or bias. In fact, much of science is devoted to sorting the seeming chaos of the natural world. We like categories, lists and rankings and labeling them all.
Humans as a species have a fascination with order. And that was the beginning of changing Dewey, of rebelling against Dewey.īROOKE GLADSTONE The powers and perils of classification, after this.īROOKE GLADSTONE From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone. They were separated from books on other presidents. JESS DeCOURCY HINDS Books on Obama were in three hundreds. LULU MILLER There were eugenics fairs at small town festivals where there'd be competitions and there'd be the best babies or the fittest families.īROOKE GLADSTONE You know what they say about the path to hell? Also, how librarians are grappling with the legacy systems they use to organize the books on their shelves. One scientist thought he was ordering the world, but really he was fostering more division. BROOKE GLADSTONE From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone.
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