Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778)

Carl Linnaeus, also known as Carl von Linn or Carolus Linnaeus, is often called the Father of Taxonomy. His system for naming, ranking, and classifying organisms is still in wide use today (with many changes). His ideas on classification have influenced generations of biologists during and after his own lifetime, even those opposed to the philosophical and theological roots of his work.

Biography of Linnaeus He was born on May 23, 1707, at Stenbrohult, in the province of Smland in southern Sweden. His father, Nils Ingemarsson Linnaeus, was both an avid gardener and a Lutheran pastor, and Carl showed a deep love of plants and a fascination with their names from a very early age. Carl disappointed his parents by showing neither aptitude nor desire for the priesthood, but his family was somewhat consoled when Linnaeus entered the University of Lund in 1727 to study medicine. A year later, he transferred to the University of Uppsala, the most prestigious university in Sweden. However, its medical facilities had been neglected and had fallen into disrepair. Most of Linaeus's time at Uppsala was spent collecting and studying plants, his true love. At the time, training in botany was part of the medical curriculum, for every doctor had to prepare and prescribe drugs derived from medicinal plants. Despite being in hard financial straits, Linnaeus mounted a botanical and ethnographical expedition to Lapland in 1731 (the portrait above shows Linnaeus as a young man, wearing a version of the traditional Lapp costume and holding a shaman's drum). In 1734 he mounted another expedition to central Sweden. Linnaeus went to the Netherlands in 1735, promptly finished his medical degree at the University of Harderwijk, and then enrolled in the University of Leiden for further studies. That same year, he published the first edition of his classification of living things, the Systema Naturae. During these years, he met or corresponded with Europe's great botanists, and continued to develop his classification scheme. Returning to Sweden in 1738, he practiced medicine (specializing in the treatment of syphilis) and lectured in Stockholm before being awarded a professorship at Uppsala in 1741. At Uppsala, he restored the University's botanical garden (arranging the plants according to his system of classification), made three more expeditions to various parts of Sweden, and inspired a generation of students. He was

instrumental in arranging to have his students sent out on trade and exploration voyages to all parts of the world: nineteen of Linnaeus's students went out on these voyages of discovery. Perhaps his most famous student, Daniel Solander, was the naturalist on Captain James Cook's first round-the-world voyage, and brought back the first plant collections from Australia and the South Pacific to Europe. Anders Sparrman, another of Linnaeus's students, was a botanist on Cook's second voyage. Another student, Pehr Kalm, traveled in the northeastern American colonies for three years studying American plants. Yet another, Carl Peter Thunberg, was the first Western naturalist to visit Japan in over a century; he not only studied the flora of Japan, but taught Western medicine to Japanese practicioners. Still others of his students traveled to South America, southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Many died on their travels. Linnaeus continued to revise his Systema Naturae, which grew from a slim pamphlet to a multivolume work, as his concepts were modified and as more and more plant and animal specimens were sent to him from every corner of the globe. (The image at right shows his scientific description of the human species from the ninth edition of Systema Naturae. At the time he referred to humanity asHomo diurnis, or "man of the day". Click on the image to see an enlargement.) Linnaeus was also deeply involved with ways to make the Swedish economy more self-sufficient and less dependent on foreign trade, either by acclimatizing valuable plants to grow in Sweden, or by finding native substitutes. Unfortunately, Linnaeus's attempts to grow cacao, coffee, tea, bananas, rice, and mulberries proved unsuccessful in Sweden's cold climate. His attempts to boost the economy (and to prevent the famines that still struck Sweden at the time) by finding native Swedish plants that could be used as tea, coffee, flour, and fodder were also not generally successful. He still found time to practice medicine, eventually becoming personal physician to the Swedish royal family. In 1758 he bought the manor estate of Hammarby, outside Uppsala, where he built a small museum for his extensive personal collections. In 1761 he was granted nobility, and became Carl von Linn. His later years were marked by increasing depression and pessimism. Lingering on for several years after suffering what was probably a series of mild strokes in 1774, he died in 1778. His son, also named Carl, succeeded to his professorship at Uppsala, but never was noteworthy as a botanist. When Carl the Younger died five years later with no heirs, his mother and sisters sold the elder Linnaeus's library, manuscripts, and natural history collections to the English natural historian Sir James Edward Smith, who founded the Linnean Society of London to take care of them.

Linnaeus's Scientific Thought Linnaeus loved nature deeply, and always retained a sense of wonder at the world of living things. His religious beliefs led him to natural theology, a school of thought dating back to Biblical times but especially flourishing around 1700: since God has created the world, it is possible to understand God's wisdom by studying His creation. As he wrote in the preface to a late edition of Systema Naturae: Creationis telluris est gloria Dei ex opere Naturae per Hominem solum -- The Earth's creation is the glory of God, as seen from the works of Nature by Man alone.

The study of nature would reveal the Divine Order of God's creation, and it was the naturalist's task to construct a "natural classification" that would reveal this Order in the universe. However, Linnaeus's plant taxonomy was based solely on the number and arrangement of the reproductive organs; a plant's class was determined by its stamens (male organs), and its order by its pistils (female organs). This resulted in many groupings that seemed unnatural. For instance, Linnaeus's Class Monoecia, Order Monadelphia included plants with separate male and female "flowers" on the same plant (Monoecia) and with multiple male organs joined onto one common base (Monadelphia). This order included conifers such as pines, firs, and cypresses (the distinction between true flowers and conifer cones was not clear), but also included a few true flowering plants, such as the castor bean. "Plants" without obvious sex organs were classified in the Class Cryptogamia, or "plants with a hidden marriage," which lumped together the algae, lichens, fungi, mosses and other bryophytes, and ferns. Linnaeus freely admitted that this produced an "artificial classification," not a natural one, which would take into account all the similarities and differences between organisms. But like many naturalists of the time, in particular Erasmus Darwin, Linnaeus attached great significance to plant sexual reproduction, which had only recently been rediscovered. Linnaeus drew some rather astonishing parallels between plant sexuality and human love: he wrote in 1729 how The flowers' leaves. . . serve as bridal beds which the Creator has so gloriously arranged, adorned with such noble bed curtains, and perfumed with so many soft scents that the bridegroom with his bride might there celebrate their nuptials with so much the greater solemnity. . . The sexual basis of Linnaeus's plant classification was controversial in its day; although easy to learn and use, it clearly did not give good results in many cases. Some critics also attacked it for its sexually explicit nature: one opponent, botanist Johann Siegesbeck, called it "loathsome harlotry". (Linnaeus had his revenge, however; he named a small, useless European weed Siegesbeckia.) Later systems of classification largely follow John Ray's practice of using morphological evidence from all parts of the organism in all stages of its development. What has survived of the Linnean system is its method of hierarchical classification and custom of binomial nomenclature. For Linnaeus, species of organisms were real entities, which could be grouped into higher categories called genera (singular, genus). By itself, this was nothing new; since Aristotle, biologists had used the word genus for a group of similar organisms, and then sought to define the differentio specifica -- the specific difference of each type of organism. But opinion varied on how genera should be grouped. Naturalists of the day often used arbitrary criteria to group organisms, placing all domestic animals or all water animals together. Part of Linnaeus' innovation was the grouping of genera into higher taxa that were also based on shared similarities. In Linnaeus's original system, genera were grouped into orders, orders into classes, and classes into kingdoms. Thus the kingdom Animalia contained the class Vertebrata, which contained the order Primates, which contained the genus Homo with the species sapiens -humanity. Later biologists added additional ranks between these to express additional levels of similarity. Before Linnaeus, species naming practices varied. Many biologists gave the species they described long, unwieldy Latin names, which could be altered at will; a scientist comparing two

descriptions of species might not be able to tell which organisms were being referred to. For instance, the common wild briar rose was referred to by different botanists as Rosa sylvestris inodora seu canina and as Rosa sylvestris alba cum rubore, folio glabro. The need for a workable naming system was made even greater by the huge number of plants and animals that were being brought back to Europe from Asia, Africa, and the Americas. After experimenting with various alternatives, Linnaeus simplified naming immensely by designating one Latin name to indicate the genus, and one as a "shorthand" name for the species. The two names make up the binomial ("two names") species name. For instance, in his two-volume work Species Plantarum (The Species of Plants), Linnaeus renamed the briar rose Rosa canina. This binomial system rapidly became the standard system for naming species. Zoological and most botanical taxonomic priority begin with Linnaeus: the oldest plant names accepted as valid today are those published in Species Plantarum, in 1753, while the oldest animal names are those in the tenth edition of Systema Naturae (1758), the first edition to use the binomial system consistently throughout. Although Linnaeus was not the first to use binomials, he was the first to use them consistently, and for this reason, Latin names that naturalists used before Linnaeus are not usually considered valid under the rules of nomenclature. In his early years, Linnaeus believed that the species was not only real, but unchangeable -- as he wrote, Unitas in omni specie ordinem ducit (The invariability of species is the condition for order [in nature]). But Linnaeus observed how different species of plant might hybridize, to create forms which looked like new species. He abandoned the concept that species were fixed and invariable, and suggested that some -- perhaps most -- species in a genus might have arisen after the creation of the world, through hybridization. In his attempts to grow foreign plants in Sweden, Linnaeus also theorized that plant species might be altered through the process of acclimitization. Towards the end of his life, Linnaeus investigated what he thought were cases of crosses between genera, and suggested that, perhaps, new genera might also arise through hybridization. Was Linnaeus an evolutionist? It is true that he abandoned his earlier belief in the fixity of species, and it is true that hybridization has produced new species of plants, and in some cases of animals. Yet to Linnaeus, the process of generating new species was not open-ended and unlimited. Whatever new species might have arisen from the primae speciei, the original species in the Garden of Eden, were still part of God's plan for creation, for they had always potentially been present. Linnaeus noticed the struggle for survival -- he once called Nature a "butcher's block" and a "war of all against all". However, he considered struggle and competition necessary to maintain the balance of nature, part of the Divine Order. The concept of openended evolution, not necessarily governed by a Divine Plan and with no predetermined goal, never occurred to Linnaeus; the idea would have shocked him. Nevertheless, Linnaeus's hierarchical classification and binomial nomenclature, much modified, have remained standard for over 200 years. His writings have been studied by every generation of naturalists, including Erasmus Darwin and Charles Darwin. The search for a "natural system" of classification is still going on -- except that what systematists try to discover and use as the basis of classification is now the evolutionary relationships of taxa.

The Linn Herbarium, at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, preserves some of Linnaeus's original plant specimens. The Museum also has an excellent, detailedbiography of

Linnaeus. You can also view Linnaeus's botanical garden and Linnaeus's manor home and garden at Hamarby, courtesy of Uppsala University, Linnaeus's alma mater. Uppsala University also maintains Linn On Line, a rich source of information on Linnaeus and his times (for those who can read Swedish). Founded a few years after Linnaeus's death, the Linnaean Society of London is still going strong as an international society for the study of natural history. The Society preserves the bulk of Linnaeus's surviving collections, manuscripts, and library. The Strandell Collection of Linneana, at Carnegie-Mellon University, and theMackenzie Linneana collection at Kansas State University, are major American collections of writings by and about Linnaeus and his associates. The Linnaeus Linkat the British Natural History Museum, aims to make available electronic versions of Linnaeus's writings and documents.

Carolus Linnaeus Dari Wikipedia bahasa Indonesia, ensiklopedia bebas

Carolus Linnaeus tahun 1775, lukisan oleh Alexander Roslin Carolus Linnaeus atau Carl (von) Linn (lahir di lmhult, 23 Mei 1707 meninggal diUppsala, 10 Januari 1778 pada umur 70 tahun) adalah seorang ilmuwan Swedia yang meletakkan dasar tatanama biologi. Ia dikenal sebagai "bapak taksonomi modern" dan juga merupakan salah satu bapak ekologi modern. Linnaeus ialah ahli botani yang paling dihormati pada masanya, dan ia juga terkenal dengan kemampuan bahasanya. Selain menjadi ahli botani, Linnaeus juga ahli dalamzoologi dan adalah seorang dokter. Biografi Carolus Linnaeus lahir di Paroki Stenbrohult (sekarang termasuk wilayah administrasilmhult), di bagian selatan Swedia[1]. Ayahnya bernama Nils Ingemarsson Linnaeus dan ibunya bernama Christina Brodersonia. Sejak kecil Linnaeus dilatih menjadi seorang anggota gereja yang setia, sebagaimana ayahnya dan kakeknya (dari ibu), namun ia kurang bersemangat mengikuti kegiatan tersebut. Ketertarikannya dalam studi botani sempat membuat seorang dokter dari kotanya terpesona dan ia dikirim untuk bersekolah di Universitas Lunduniversitas terdekat, kemudian pindah ke Universitas Uppsala setelah satu tahun. Dalam masa-masa ini Linnaeus mempunyai keyakinan bahwa dalam benang sari dan putik bunga terkandung dasar-dasar klasifikasitumbuhan, maka ia menuliskan sebuah makalah singkat pada suatu mata kuliah yang berhasil membuatnya menjadi pembantu profesor. Tahun 1732 Badan Akademik Ilmu Pengetahuan Alam di Uppsala membiayai

ekspedisinya untuk meneliti Laplandia. Hasilnya adalah tulisan berjudul Flora Laponica yang dicetak tahun 1737. Pada tahun 1735 Linnaeus pindah ke Belanda. Di sana ia mendapatkan gelar dokter dari Universitas Harderwijk. Gelar ini ialah satu-satunya gelar akademik yang berhasil didapatkan Linnaeus, dan ia memperolehnya hanya dalam waktu enam hari, termasuk tiga hari mencetak catatan-catatan botaninya dalam bahasa Latin. Penamaan dan Klasifikasi Pada tahun 1735 pula,Carolus Linnaeus menemukan sebuah sistem penamaan organisme/ makhluk hidup, sistem ini dikenal dengan nama Binominal Nomenclature. Setiap nama organisme terdiri dari dua nama dalam bahasa latin, karena bahasa latin atau yunani merupakan bahasa yang banyak dipakai di sekolah-sekolah atau lembaga akademik pada saat itu.Nama yang pertama disebut sebagai Genus dan nama yang kedua adalah nama spesies dari organisme tersebut dan tidak ditulis dengan huruf kapital. Genus dan spesies ditulis dengan memberikan garis bawah atau dengan huruf miring. Sebagai contoh, Staphylococcus aureus adalah bakteri yang sudah umum dikenal. Staphylococcus adalah Genus dari bakteri tersebut dan aureus adalah nama spesies nya. Dalam Kasus ini, Genus menggambarkan keadaan nyata atau keadaan yang nampak dari sel tersebut. Staphylo artinya susunannya bergerombol kecil seperti buah anggur dan coccus menandakan bahwa bentuk selnya bulat.Dengan kata lain, Staphylococcus berarti segerombolan sel yang berbentuk seperti bola/ bulatan bulatan.Aureus adalah bahasa latin untuk emas, ini berarti Staphylococcus aureus adalah segerombolan sel yang berbentuk seperti bola/ bulatan bulatan dan memiliki corak emas[2]. Pernikahan Pada tahun 1739 Linnaeus menikah dengan Sara Elisabeth Morea di Stockholm. Linnaeus diangkat sebagai profesor dalam bidang kedokteran di Universitas Uppsala pada tahun 1741 dan ia pindah ke sana, tetapi tidak berapa lama kemudian beralih menjadi profesor di bidang botani. Linnaeus meneruskan kerja dalam sistem klasifikasi serta memperluas pula pada Kerajaan (Regnum) Hewan dan Kerajaan Mineral. Pada tahun 1757 ia mendapat gelar kebangsawanan (von) dari Raja Swedia Adolf Fredrik, sehingga dapat menggunakan nama Carl von Linn[3]. Di Belanda Linnaeus bertemu dengan ahli botani Jan Frederik Gronovius dan memperlihatkannya rancangan makalahnya mengenai taksonomi, yang berjudul Systema Naturae. Di dalamnya, penggunaan deskripsi resmi - physalis amno ramosissime ramis angulosis glabris foliis dentoserratis - diganti olehnya menjadi nama genus-species yang ringkas dan akrab pada zaman sekarang - Physalis angulata - dan penggolongan taksa lebih tinggi dibuat secara berurutan. Meskipun sistem ini, tatanama binomial (nomenklatur binomial), dikembangkan oleh Bauhin bersaudara, Linnaeus dapat dikatakan sebagai yang mempeloporinya. Pada akhir hidupnya, Linnaeus sering menderita sakit, seperti encok dan sakit gigi[4] Ia terkena serangan stroke dua kali, yaitu pada tahun 1774 dan 1776, hingga kehilangan fungsi bagian tubuhnya bagian kanan. Linnaeus meninggal dunia pada 10 Januari 1778 di Uppsala pada suatu upacara di Katedral Uppsala dan kemudian ia dimakamkan di katedral tersebut[5]. Tatanama Linnaeus

Sumbangan utama Linnaeus bagi ilmu taksonomi ialah pembuatan konvensi penamaan organisme hidup yang diterima secara universal dalam dunia ilmiahkarya Linnaeus tersebut menjadi titik awal tatanama biologi. Selain itu, Linnaeus mengembangkan, selama pengembangan besar pengetahuan sejarah alam pada abad ke-18, hal yang sekarang disebut sebagai taksonomi Linnaeus, yaitu sistem klasifikasi ilmiah yang kini digunakan secara luas dalam biologi. Sistem Linnaeus mengklasifikasikan alam dalam hirarki atau tingkatan-tingkatan, dimulai dengan tiga "kerajaan". Kerajaan dibagi ke dalam Kelas dan masing-masing Kelas terbagi dalam Ordo, yang dibagi dalam Genera (bentuk tunggal: genus), yang dibagi dalamSpesies. Di bawah tingkatan spesies, Linnaeus kadang menyebutkan takson yang tidak diberinya nama (untuk tumbuhan, hal ini sekarang dinamai "varietas"). Linnaeus menamai taksa dengan sesuatu yang mengena pada ciri khusus taksa tersebut. Sebagai contoh, manusia adalah Homo sapiens, tetapi ia juga menyatakan bahwa ada species manusia kedua, Homo troglotydes (bermakna "orang goa", yang ia maksudkan untuk simpanse dan sekarang ditempatkan dalam genus berbeda (bukan Homo) melainkan Pan troglotydes). Kelompok mamaliadinamai berdasarkan kelenjar susu (mammae) karena salah satu definisi karakteristik mamalia adalah bahwa mereka merawat bayinya. (Dari beberapa perbedaan antara mamalia dan hewan lain, Linnaeus lebih memilih hal ini karena pandangannya pada pentingnya keberadaan induk betina.) Hanya sistem pengelompokan hewan oleh Linnaeus yang masih tetap digunakan hingga kini, dan pengelompokan itu sendiri sudah banyak berubah sejak dicetuskan oleh Linnaeus sebagaimana prinsip-prinsip yang melandasi pengelompokan itu juga banyak berubah. Namun demikian, Linnaeus tetap dianggap berjasa mengembangkan gagasan struktur hirarki klasifikasi yang didasari oleh sifat-sifat teramati. Rincian dasar tentang hal yang dapat dianggap sah secara ilmiah untuk disebut 'sifat teramati' itu sendiri telah berubah seiring bertambahnya pengetahuan (contohnya, DNA yang pada masa hidup Linnaeus tidak dikenal telah terbukti bermanfaat dalam mengklasifikasikan dan menentukan hubungan organisme hidup satu dengan lainnya), namun prinsip-prinsip dasarnya tetap masuk akal.