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Quotes of the Day for 23 May 2005 - Organization

Carl Linnaeus was born at Stenbrohult, Sweden on this day in 1707. He was groomed to enter the ministry, but an advanced interest in botany determined his education. A paper he wrote classifying plants based on the structure of their stamens and pistils earned him a professorship, and he was soon dispatched to Lapland to catalog its flora. He developed the first taxonomy of living things in his Systema Naturae, based on kingdoms (plants and animals), classes, orders, families, genera, and species, a system that is used to this day although we have introduced phyla as a level between kingdoms and classes. Linnaeus named a great many plants and animals, including Homo sapiens, and quite a few of his names stuck although further analysis over the last four centuries has caused many species to end up in different genera and even families. I didn't have any quotes on taxonomy, but these on Organization come close to the meaning.

We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way - an agreement that holds through our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language.
     - Benjamin Lee Whorf, 1897 - 1941

Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn't have to experience it.
     - Max Frisch

I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.
     - Detronius Arbiter

Artists, whatever their medium, make selections from the abounding materials of life, and organize these selections into works that are under the control of the artist.... In relation to the inclusiveness and literally endless intricacy of life, art is arbitrary, symbolic and abstracted. That is its value and the source of its own kind of order and coherence.
     - Jane Jacobs

Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of organized life.
     - George Bernard Shaw, 1856 - 1950

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