Linnaeus

Carolus Linnæus (1707-1778), aka Carl von Linné, was a Swedish naturalist, the father of modern taxonomy, and a pioneer of scientific racism. He came up with binomial nomenclature, those two-part Latin names for every known species on Earth. He dubbed man Homo sapiens – “man, the wise”. The name stuck and so did his classification system, laid out in “Systema Naturae” (1735).

Linnaeus is also the first to use the symbols for Mars (♂) and Venus (♀) to mean male and female.

“Systema Naturae” (1735) – system of nature – was not the only one. Cuvier, Blumenbach, and others had their own, but the Linnean system is the one that caught on among biologists (but not geologists – they do not use his system for classifying rocks). It gave a standard Latin name for every species of plant and animal. And it arranged them all into a vast family tree, one for plants, another for animals. Species were grouped into genera (plural of genus), genera into orders, orders into classes, classes into kingdoms.

By 1758, it went like this for humans:

• Kingdom: Animalia
• Class: Mammalia
• Order: Primates
• Genus: Homo
• Species: sapiens

The last two make up the scientific name: Homo sapiens.

Primates was made up of the genera:

• Homo (humans),
• Simia (monkeys and apes),
• Lemur (lemurs and colugos) and
• Vespertilio (bats).

Homo in turn had two species:

• sapiens (humans) and
• troglodytes (orangutans, chimpanzees?).

Homo sapiens had six “varieties” (he did not use the word “race”), four based on continent and skin colour:

• ferus,
• americanus,
• europæus,
• asiaticus,
• afer,
• monstrosus.

In 1758 he started adding Racist Uncle descriptions to his book. By 1767, in his last edition, it went like this (as translated from Latin by the Wikipedia but with corrections):

• The Americanus: red, choleric, upright; black, straight, thick hair; stubborn, zealous, free; painting himself with red lines, and regulated by customs.
• The Europeanus: white, sanguine, brawny; with abundant, long hair; blue eyes; gentle, acute, inventive; covered with close vestments; and governed by laws.
• The Asiaticus: yellow, melancholic, stiff; black hair, dark eyes; severe, haughty, greedy; covered with loose clothing; and ruled by opinions.
• The Afer or Africanus: black, phlegmatic, relaxed [posture]; black, frizzled hair; silky skin, flat nose, swollen lips; females [with] elongated labia; mammary glands give milk abundantly; sly, lazy, careless; anoints himself with grease; and governed by caprice.

Monstrosus now included Ferus (feral children) in addition to dwarves, the Patagonian giant, the single-testicled Khoikhoi (Hottentot) of Africa, and others.

Right before our eyes Linnaeus turns racist stereotypes into fact, into “objective”, scientific truth – and makes the stereotypes inborn and biologically determined! Thus the dawn of scientific racism in the late 1700s. Linnaeus did not rank the varieties. That will come in 1795 with Blumenbach.

Linnaeus did not believe in evolution. Species were fixed and unchanging, created in the beginning by the Christian god. Varieties were a thing of change, chance and circumstance, but could not lead to new, separate species. The family tree of life was merely a way to make it easier to look up stuff. But others saw in it the story of life. Thus Darwin in the 1800s.

– Abagond, 2021.

Sources: Google Images; “Race in North America” (2012) by Audrey and Brian D. Smedley; I used the Wikipedia translation (2021), which is one of the more complete and less sanitized ones; Systema Naturae (1758).

See also:

• Cuvier
  • lips
• Blumenbach
  • Caucasian
• White American racism: the 1700s
  • Black people according to Thomas Jefferson
  • Thomas Jefferson and the Great Wink of 1776
• Racist Uncles
• stereotype
• The term “race”
• scientific racism
• Darwin
  • Darwin: The Races of Man

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