Carl Linnaeus — Contributions to Biology

Carl Linnaeus, born in 1707 in a poorer area of Sweden, developed an unquenchable passion for Botany at an early age — despite it’s widely held reputation of hardly being a subject, let alone the foundation for a career.

Today, Linnaeus is known as the father of Taxonomy after his development of Binomial Nomenclature — a system of naming species that is still used today (he was also the first person to grow a banana in Europe).

Aristotle was first to classify animals by shared characteristics, however, before Linnaeus, there was no standardised naming system and no international body to develop one. This led to confusing and disorganised naming where the same species would have different names in different texts.

In response to this, Linnaeus developed the taxonomic hierarchy, consisting of Kingdom, Class, Order, Genus, and Species of which only Kingdom and Species were considered ‘natural’ — the rest just used for ease of classification (today the system is slightly more developed: Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Genus, and Species); and standardised the naming of species as ‘Genus Species’ (for example ‘Canis Familiaris’).

In 1735, Linnaeus published the first addition (of many) of ‘Systema Naturae’, in which he made the first attempt to name all known species in the world — believing there couldn’t be more than 10,000 (after reaching flowering plant number 7,700, I imagine he realised why his was the first ever attempt…).