A gardener friend of ours used to object to calling a plant by its Latin name. She heard it as pretense and obfuscation. But after the sage incident, she conceded that there was some point to it.

SKEPTICISM IS A VIRTUE: That’s the slogan under which Brill’s Content, the media-watchdog magazine, wages war on bias, cant, and sloppiness in the press. The magazine can be tough on journalists whom ...

God, the Bible tells us, gave Adam the job of naming the animals. But it was Carl Linnaeus who figured out a good way to do it. Linnaeus, also known as Carolus Linnaeus or Carol von Linne, was the ...

For two years in the late 1970s I followed in the footsteps of Carl Linnaeus: I toiled in the field of taxonomy. The small corner of nature's jigsaw puzzle that I tackled was a group of marine sponges ...

The relevance of taxonomy in our genomic era is greater than ever. Correct naming is crucial for developing new foods and medicines, and for understanding our changing environment. Amazingly, we do ...