Quote of the day by Carl Linnaeus: "I well know what a splendidly great diff.."

Image: Wikipedia/AI-Refined Centuries before modern genetics established the close evolutionary relationship between humans and other primates, Carl Linnaeus was already willing to examine humanity through the eyes of a naturalist. In one of his reflections, he acknowledged the moral and religious distinctions people traditionally placed between humans and other animals, but then deliberately set those ideas aside to study the body itself. He wrote, “It behooves me like a cobbler to stick to my last, in my own workshop, and as a naturalist to consider man and his body.” He went on to observe that he knew scarcely a physical feature by which humans could be distinguished from apes. The passage reveals an important quality of scientific thinking: the willingness to examine nature as it is, rather than simply according to assumptions about where humans believe they belong.Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) was a Swedish botanist, zoologist and physician best known for establishing the system of biological classification and the binomial naming system still used to identify species today. His classification of humans within the animal kingdom was particularly significant because it placed human...