"P van Rijckevorsel" wrote
Whenever a person starts talking about taxonomy as starting with
Linnaeus I am assuming there are so many screws loose in the brain that
anything else said will be pretty close to madness and I only glance through
the rest. I had not really noticed that this one was even crazier that at
first apparent.

c.mcculloch schreef
As the large majority of people believe that the 1758 version of Systema
Naturae *was* the beginning of modern taxonomy, you must miss out on a lot
of reading? Give Linnaeus his due - despite the flaws, his system has served
us pretty well and should not be rudely dismissed.

I am interested, though, in where you would put the staring point?
Colin

+ + +
I am quite dubious if the large majority of people believe that Linnaeus is
the beginning of modern taxonomy. You are the first one I meet ;-) Botany
uses 1753 as the starting point of binary nomenclature, another matter
entirely.

All accounts of botanical taxonomy start off with Theophrastus, and modern
taxonomy is assumed to start with Caesalpinus (1519-1603) or John Ray
(1628-1705). Binary combinations on a largish scale were first used by de
Tournefort (1656-1708).

I doubt that you could easily find anybody who knows what the system of
Linnaeus is, it has fallen in disuse so long ago that only students of
history are even vaguely familiar with it. Even when published it was
worthless, from a scientific perspective.

========
On the matter of DNA somebody on another list said something which is too
good not to repeat:

The answer you would get if you sequenced everything and gave it to an
infinitely powerful computer is, of course, 42. Trouble is we are too
lazy to work out what the question really is.

===========
PvR