“I FEEL like I am standing in a field in the 11th century, trying to show a ploughman that literacy would be of value to him.”
So says an exasperated Daniel Janzen, a tropical ecologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, trying desperately to communicate his grand vision for revolutionising the way people interact with nature. He wants to give every one of us a device for identifying any living thing we find, which he hopes will lead to a new age of universal “bioliteracy”.
He is not alone. Taxonomy, the science of naming and describing living things, is…
