![]() ![]() It is, in other words, a conceptual world made for the mind of an eighteen-year-old. It is like the army: men (plus women, nowadays) into squads, squads into platoons, platoons into companies, and in the final aggregate, the armed services headed by the joint chiefs of staff. Restricting ourselves for simplicity to concepts with a single place to fill, we can say that to every concept corresponds a single set of objects for example. On this condition, the human mind can scientifically dominate. It means to acknowledge that there is a reality which is, at the same time, a source of scientific knowledge, of ethical questioning, and of religious. Then on to higher classification, where similar genera are grouped into families, families into orders, and so on up to phyla and finally, at the very summit, the six kingdoms-plants, animals, fungi, protists, monerans, and archaea. Science resolves its concepts and its definitions in the observable and the measurable as such. Next, you label each species with a two-part Latinized name, such as Corvus ossifragus for the fish crow, where Corvus stands for the genus-all the species of crows- and ossifragus for the fish crow in particular. Examples of such groups are all the crows and all the oaks. Then you sort species resembling one another into groups, the genera. You start by separating specimens of plants and animals into species. My intellectual world was framed by Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist who invented modern biological classification.
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