Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral?
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/animal-vegetable-mineral-9780198705130?cc=us&lang=en&# * http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/animal-vegetable-mineral-by-gillian-beer-review/ * http://www.sciencefestival.cam.ac.uk/features/speaker-spotlights/speaker-spotlight-dr-susannah-gibson
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2015128692
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Gibson, Susannah
Found in: Animal, vegetable, mineral?, 2015: t.p. (Susannah Gibson)
Associated language:
eng
================================================================================
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave., SE
Washington, DC 20540
Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:University of Cambridge, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of Cambridge, affiliated scholar; Cambridge Literary Festival, festival manager and head of science and children’s programming.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Susannah Gibson studied experimental physics and the history of nineteenth-century science before completing her doctorate in the history of eighteenth-century life sciences at the University of Cambridge. Since completing her doctorate, Gibson has remained at the University of Cambridge as an affiliated scholar. She also works as festival manager and head of science and children’s programming for the Cambridge Literary Festival.
Gibson’s first book, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? How Eighteenth-Century Science Disrupted the Natural Order was released in 2015, and the book is based on the author’s doctoral dissertation. The volume examines changes in eighteenth-century science and how those changes and discoveries provided a paradigm shift in perceptions of natural orders. To this end, Gibson provides an overview of several lesser-known scientists and studies, many of whom ultimately influenced Darwin as he wrote The Origin of Species. Essentially, eighteenth-century scientists challenged the definition and categorical outlines for distinguishing plants, animals, and minerals as wholly separate from one another. The then-recent discovery of polyps (which have both plant and animal traits) helped challenge previously accepted divisions, Gibson reports. Studies of coral presented similar conundrums, and Gibson explains how scientists have approached these questions. Essentially, naturalists used chemistry and Newtonian physics to determine how a plant could exhibit an animal behavior. These moves ultimately informed Darwin.
Discussing her aims for Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? on the Cambridge Science Festival’s Web site, Gibson remarked: “I hope that people will see that the questions we ask today about the meaning of ‘life’ are . . . similar to the questions asked throughout history . . . and that this questioning is a fundamental human activity. History of science is wonderful for letting us see science as a . . . human thing; it allows us to think about the bigger concerns that have always interested people. It acts as a mirror in which we see a part of ourselves that can sometimes be obscured by . . . detail: instead of asking, ‘what’s the result of this experiment?’ we ask, ‘why do humans experiment at all?'” The author went on to note: “I also hope that people will see how simple questions can become very complex very quickly; that curiosity is as important as knowing the ‘right’ answer.”
Reviews of Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? were largely positive, and F.T. Kuserk in Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries noted that Gibson “delves into the works of oftentimes obscure individuals.” Yet, in a rare ambivalent assessment, a Times Literary Supplement Online correspondent found that “Gibson does, unfortunately for her, have to face the fact that these forgotten disputes based on what was essentially ignorance of the facts have lost some of their savour and interest. The universal acceptance of evolution as a truth, and since then the far-reaching effects of the revolution in genetics, have swept all these arguments away. But she brings back to life some of the leading controversialists, and the still fascinating fervour and intelligence that they brought to trying to solve their problems.”
In the words of Nature reviewer Jennifer Rampling, “Gibson unpacks the experiments and speculations that underpinned Enlightenment natural history, showing how finds pushed at disciplinary boundaries.” Gillian Beer, writing in the Telegraph Online, offered further applause, asserting that “Gibson designates as a ‘fourth kingdom’ plants with feelings and perhaps even intentions, a category that disturbs the clear boundaries of ‘animal, vegetable, and mineral.’. . . Gibson’s account of these and other entanglements does justice to the reach of technical work by individuals, sometimes enthusiasts as much as scientists. And her plain style opens out for the reader enduring arguments about life, its sources and its varieties.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, April, 2016, F.T. Kuserk, review of Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? How Eighteenth-Century Science Disrupted the Natural Order.
Nature, July 30, 2015, Jennifer Rampling, review of Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?
ONLINE
Cambridge Science Festival Web site, http://www.sciencefestival.cam.ac.uk/ (April 5, 2017), author interview.
Telegraph Online (London, England), http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ (April 5, 2017), Gillian Beer, review of Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?
Times Literary Supplement, http://www.the-tls.co.uk/ (April 5, 2017), review of Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?
Susannah Gibson, Affiliated scholar, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge
Susannah Gibson is an affiliated scholar at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge. She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge on the history of the life sciences in the eighteenth century. She also hold a master's degree in history of nineteenth-century science, and a bachelor's degree in experimental physics. She currently works at Cambridge Literary Festival as festival manager and head of science and children's programming.
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?
How eighteenth-century science disrupted the natural order
Susannah Gibson
Description
Since the time of Aristotle, there had been a clear divide between the three kingdoms of animal, vegetable, and mineral. But by the eighteenth century, biological experiments, and the wide range of new creatures coming to Europe from across the world, challenged these neat divisions. Abraham Trembley found that freshwater polyps grew into complete individuals when cut. This shocking discovery raised deep questions: was it a plant or an animal? And this was not the only conundrum. What of coral? Was it a rock or a living form? Did plants have sexes, like animals? The boundaries appeared to blur. And what did all this say about the nature of life itself? Were animals and plants soul-less, mechanical forms, as Descartes suggested? The debates raging across science played into some of the biggest and most controversial issues of Enlightenment Europe. In this book, Susannah Gibson explains how a study of pond slime could cause people to question the existence of the soul; observation of eggs could make a man doubt that God had created the world; how the discovery of the Venus fly-trap was linked to the French Revolution; and how interpretations of fossils could change our understanding of the Earth's history. Using rigorous historical research, and a lively and readable style, this book vividly captures the big concerns of eighteenth-century science. And the debates concerning the divisions of life did not end there; they continue to have resonances in modern biology.
Dr Susannah Gibson, author of Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? introduces early experiments used to solve the mysteries of life and the fantastical creatures behind them, somersaulting polyps, suspicious sea sponges and frogs in trousers!
Susannah will be speaking at this year’s Festival during her event Animal, vegetable, mineral.
CSF: What made you want to write your book Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?
SG: The book grew out of some research I did for my PhD thesis. I realised that all the weird, and utterly engrossing, creatures I’d spent years reading about might make an interesting topic for a non-academic book. I think history of science makes for really engrossing reading: it’s got everything – quirky characters, dramatic experiments, big debates – all set against the backdrop of fascinating historical periods (the Enlightenment, in this case). Lots of the questions that were controversial then are still being debated today. So even though the experiments I study are more than 250 years old, the things they were designed to investigate (for example, how reproduction works) are still relevant to today’s society.
CSF: What’s it about?
SG: It’s about how people have tried to understand, scientifically, the nature and meaning of life throughout history. Much of the book is set in the 18th century when people were obsessed with the idea of classifying all of nature into groups like ‘animal’, ‘vegetable’, and ‘mineral’. In this period, European empires were expanding and thousands of new creatures became known to western science. As naturalists studied more and more species from different parts of the world, they soon realised that lots of creatures don’t fit into these simple categories. To learn more, they conducted further experiments on things like corals, sponges, pond slime and the Venus fly-trap, and found that their results could lead people to question the existence of the soul, the role of God in creation, the existence of a ‘natural order’ and even the social order. It’s about how (seemingly) small questions can lead to very dramatic answers.
CSF: There are probably many weird and wonderful experiments scientists historically conducted. Which was the weirdest you came across? And which was the most controversial?
SG: One of the weirder experiments I came across involved an Italian clergyman named Lazzaro Spallanzani making tiny pairs of trousers for frogs as a way to investigate the theory of spontaneous generation. This was a theory that went back at least as far as Aristotle, and which was still widely believed in the mid-18th century. I don’t want to say too much now as I’ll talk more about this in my event on 18 March.
As well as experimenting on frogs (which are a perfectly good experimental subject, but not exactly novel), naturalists were extremely excited about experimenting on all of the new creatures being discovered around the world at this time. The Venus fly-trap was first seen by Europeans in the 1760s, and naturalists had a wonderful time trying to grow them in European gardens, and feeding them flies to figure out how they worked.
Some of the most controversial findings in this period came from quite straightforward experiments; for example, in the 1730s and ‘40s Abraham Trembley cut some fresh-water polyps in half (these are small green creatures that live in stagnant ponds) and watched as each part re-grew into a complete and fully-functioning individual. Cutting slimy little pond-dwellers in two doesn’t sound like a big deal, but Trembley’s results were startling: they seemed to prove that these creatures were half-plant and half-animal.
As well as destroying the idea of clear boundaries between the kingdoms, Trembley’s results made people speculate on bigger questions, such as: if you cut an individual in two, and each part regenerates, what happens to the soul? Have you cut the soul in two? Does this show that the soul is simply a function of matter? This experiment really made people think about how scientific results could affect, for example, religious beliefs.
CSF: What did these experiments prove, if anything?
SG: Lazzaro Spallanzani’s experiments on frogs in trousers proved that both the male and female parent contribute to conception; before this, the role of the male’s semen was debated, and many believed that only the female was essential to conception. The results of this series of experiments ruled out many of the prevailing theories of reproduction of the 18th century, including pre-formation theory. This theory stated that all the people, animals and plants that would ever exist had been created by God at the beginning of the world, then folded up in serial order and nested within its parent. These experiments also ruled out the possibility of spontaneous generation.
The experiments on Venus fly-traps and fresh-water polyps proved that the neat separation of all living things into just two categories, animal and vegetable, wasn’t always possible. These experiments and observations made people question the simple classifications that had been used for millennia, and raised the possibility of a new kingdom which was a hybrid between the plant and animal kingdoms. Today, scientists recognise dozens of different kingdoms, with the plant and animal kingdoms making up only a small percentage of life on Earth. These experiments also made people think about the similarities between living things, and it was in this period (a century before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species) that people began to speculate on the possibility of species transmuting into new species.
CSF: How did it all affect or change society as a whole?
SG: These weren’t just scientific questions; they also had implications for theology, philosophy, politics and society at large. The Book of Genesis had described the creation of the earth and its plants and animals, and so most natural history followed the three-kingdom model (animal, vegetable, mineral). By suggesting that there were more than three kingdoms, naturalists were beginning to question the literal truth of the Bible. Fossils were particularly difficult to classify: they appeared to be made of stone, but looked like animals or plants. By speculating on their origins, naturalists found themselves doubting the account of the Creation given in Genesis. Of course, questioning the truth of biblical creation could lead to questions about, for example, the God-given power of monarchs, or the idea that society had been divinely ordered into upper and lower classes.
The 18th century was a period of Enlightenment; free thinking was encouraged, and interest in science was expanding rapidly. These kinds of questions fascinated Enlightenment thinkers; they were excited about the possibilities of using new ideas from science to question long-standing beliefs about the natural world, and the societies in which they lived.
CSF: So, what do you hope people take away from the book or talk?
SG: I hope that people will see that the questions we ask today about the meaning of ‘life’ are very similar to the questions asked throughout history (from at least the time of Aristotle), and that this questioning is a fundamental human activity. History of science is wonderful for letting us see science as a very human thing; it allows us to think about the bigger concerns that have always interested people. It acts as a mirror in which we see a part of ourselves that can sometimes be obscured by excessive detail: instead of asking, ‘what’s the result of this experiment?’ we ask, ‘why do humans experiment at all?’
I also hope that people will see how simple questions can become very complex very quickly; that curiosity is as important as knowing the ‘right’ answer. And that nature has created some truly extraordinary creatures.
CSF: What do you think your next book will be about?
SG: It’s in the early stages, so I don’t want to say too much yet, but there may be ectoplasm...
Singer Prize commendations
February 2011
Congratulations to Jenny Bangham and Susannah Gibson on being awarded special commendations in the 2010 BSHS Singer Prize competition. Jenny's essay was on 'The Rhesus controversy: scientific notations, paper tools and their articulation' and Susannah's on 'Newtonian vegetables and perceptive plants'.
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?
Jennifer Rampling
523.7562 (July 30, 2015): p530.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Nature Publishing Group
http://www.nature.com/nature/index.html
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?
Susannah Gibson
Oxford Univ. Press: 2015.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
While dallying among the rock pools this summer, spare a thought for earlier naturalists --starting with Aristotle--who scoured the boundary between earth and sea for genre-defying specimens of life. Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? is a book about boundaries, following the attempts of eighteenth-century men of science to classify nature, despite natures apparent reluctance to be classified. From fossils and Venus flytraps to corals and somersaulting polyps, organisms seeped across the ancient borders between animal, plant and mineral, inciting feuds and rival theories among those who sought to place them.
Susannah Gibson unpacks the experiments and speculations that underpinned Enlightenment natural history, showing how finds pushed at disciplinary boundaries. Puzzled naturalists drew on chemistry and Newtonian physics to explain how plants breathed and embryos formed, and fossils offered a key to the new field of geology. Sensitive plants and self-generating animals also ignited religious and philosophical controversy about how to define life, locate the soul and detect God's role in creation. Gibson's story whisks us from one taxonomical can of worms to the next.
Jennifer Rampling is assistant professor of history at Princeton University in New Jersey, where she teaches the history of science.
Rampling, Jennifer
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Rampling, Jennifer. "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?" Nature, vol. 523, no. 7562, 2015, p. 530. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA423819463&it=r&asid=0ebea7e5511b145401b355d1a6147725. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A423819463
Gibson, Susannah. Animal, vegetable, mineral?: how eighteenth-century science disrupted the natural order
F.T. Kuserk
53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1186.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Gibson, Susannah. Animal, vegetable, mineral?: how eighteenth-century science disrupted the natural order. Oxford, 2015. 215p bibl Index ISBN 9780198705130 cloth, $34.95; ISBN 9780198705130 ebook, contact publisher for price
(cc) 53-3488
QL85
MARC
While 1859, the year that Darwin published his On the Origin of Species, stands as a milestone in the history of biological thought, it is only because Darwin stood on the shoulders of those giants before him who laid the foundation more than a century before. Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? is the story of how 18th-century science changed the prevailing natural order. In this, the authors revised doctoral dissertation, Gibson (affiliated scholar, Univ. of Cambridge, UK) delves into the works of oftentimes obscure individuals to explain how Aristotelian concepts of what separates animals, plants, and minerals from one another emerged during this time. Are polyps animals or plants? And what could be made of coral, a mineral whose outer covering bursts forth in flowerlike fashion? While the details of how these mysteries were solved are fascinating, the important point is that during this critical pre-Darwinian period, the static view of nature was slowly being transformed. Darwin finally swept away the notion that species were individually and instantaneously created at the beginning of time. Without the prior questioning of his predecessors, however, he might not have been able to see as far as he did. Summing Up: ** Recommended. All history of science collections.--F. T. Kuserk, Moravian College
Kuserk, F.T.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Kuserk, F.T. "Gibson, Susannah. Animal, vegetable, mineral?: how eighteenth-century science disrupted the natural order." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1186. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661619&it=r&asid=9365eaa36a0b8ead7fe877c52da85a1d. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A449661619
Animal Vegetable Mineral? by Susannah Gibson, review: 'a measured judgement'
John Tenniel's illustration of Alice with the Lion and the Unicorn in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1871
John Tenniel's illustration of Alice with the Lion and the Unicorn in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 1871 Credit: AF Fotografie / Alamy
Gillian Beer
19 August 2015 • 9:31am
The idea that all life may be classified into one of "three great kingdoms" - animal, vegetable and mineral - goes back to Aristotle. In this attractive and clearly written study, Susannah Gibson traces how the idea persisted for two millennia, into the 19th century. These categories secured the natural world in a manageable order, even while they raised awkward questions about crossovers between classes, and whether human beings were in a separate, superior category. Sometimes, as in Lewis Carroll's Wonderland, it's a question of perspective: "The Lion looked at Alice wearily. 'Are you animal - or vegetable - or mineral?' he said, yawning at every other word. 'It's a fabulous monster!' the Unicorn cried out, before Alice could reply."
Classifying is a fundamental and enduring pleasure; sorting things into classes promises ordered knowledge and reveals hidden relationships. But even while scholars and scientists through the 18th century tried to reduce material into a few categories, classes constantly threatened to proliferate. Only much later did chemistry permit a lean description of organic material: "that which contains certain carbon-based molecules".
Gibson argues that it was later-18th-century scientists whose investigations did most to destabilise the settled categories of animal, vegetable and mineral, paving the way for Darwin's new evolutionary taxonomy. Seemingly local questions about polyps or spinach plants opened out into intellectual and theological debates that threatened to undermine settled assumptions about life itself, whether it was a mechanical process or driven by an unquantifiable spark. She suggests that this long-continuing debate was at its most intense as the Enlightenment opened towards the Industrial Revolution.
Gibson concentrates on particular people and on the often unforeseen implications of their investigations. In each case, she gives a sympathetic account of what was particular to the work and the person: Linnaeus, Joseph Banks, Abraham Trembley and his young pupils, Oliver Goldsmith, Luigi Marsigli, James Edward Smith, William "Strata" Smith and many others. It's surprising, though, that Erasmus Darwin hardly figures, despite the importance for botany of his Zoonomia.
Gibson offers vivid exposition and reflection, and she includes some fascinating hoaxes that help to articulate what was being questioned and what was known at a particular time: for example, the Eibelstadt fossils, "found" by two teenage boys, which appeared to show (among other impossibilities) a "fossil depiction of the sun and its rays" and "the name of God in Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew". Johann Beringer, dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Würzberg, was convinced that these objects were genuine but, Gibson makes clear, he was not simply duped; he spent a year carefully researching and sorting the materials before he presented his findings. Gibson gives a measured judgment that emphasises just how problematic fossils were to classify: if fossils were "sports of nature" they could take any form; if they had to have been "derived from onceliving animals or plants" then the Eibelstadt examples were clearly fakes. The debate pinpoints how different were the methods of verification available from those we take for granted now: a salutary reminder that we are all, including scientists, trapped in the historical moment.
Gibson designates as a "fourth kingdom" plants with feelings and perhaps even intentions, a category that disturbs the clear boundaries of "animal, vegetable, and mineral": sensitive plants, insect-eating plants, irritable plants, polyps that regenerate themselves. Such plants and their predatory and lascivious ways also raise questions about generation: in the sexual life of plants, broader issues of reproduction, descent and creation become entangled. Gibson's account of these and other entanglements does justice to the reach of technical work by individuals, sometimes enthusiasts as much as scientists. And her plain style opens out for the reader enduring arguments about life, its sources and its varieties.
Gibson
Animal Vegetable Mineral? by Susannah Gibson
240pp, OUP, £16.99, eBook £14.14. To order this book from the Telegraph for £14.99 plus £1.99 p&p call 0844 871 1515 or or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
Follow Telegraph Books
Neither fish nor fowl
In the eighteenth century, a passion to classify the natural world took hold of Europe. Travellers and explorers were bringing back enormous numbers of unknown plants and animals, and the primary requirement was to distinguish them from each other and name them. But from that there swiftly grew another urgent desire among scientists and thinkers – to put them in some sort of intelligible order. “Good order is the foundation of all good things”, said that eighteenth-century man of sense, Edmund Burke.
A basic classification of nature into three kingdoms – the animal, the vegetable and the mineral – had been in existence for centuries, an inheritance from both Aristotle and the Bible. But what were the boundaries of those kingdoms? What items of the natural world should be put in each of them? That was a far from settled matter. Susannah Gibson’s book explores the ideas that arose, and the debates and disputes that followed from them.
One question that many thinkers especially wanted to resolve was the boundary between plants and animals – and two events in particular inflamed controversy about that. In 1741 an ardent naturalist, Abraham Trembley, the son of a Genevan politician, announced a remarkable discovery he had made about polyps – odd little, tentacled inhabitants of stagnant ditches. He had cut a polyp in two, and had watched each half regenerate itself as another perfect polyp. Plants, it was known, could regenerate from cuttings, but no current definition of an animal included any such means of reproduction. So was a polyp an animal or a plant?
Then, in the 1760s, John Bartram and William Young, respectively the King’s and the Queen’s Botanist for North America, reported on another startling discovery they had made in the swamplands of the Carolinas. They had each watched the hairy red leaves of a plant – later to be called the Venus flytrap – close on a fly and swallow it. Digestion of food had previously been thought one of the essential features defining an animal. So was this strange thing a plant or an animal?
Many people now began thinking something still more troubling. Were these even the right questions? Was not the truth, perhaps, that the polyp and flytrap were intermediate creatures, and that there was actually no boundary between the animal and the plant kingdom at all? Perhaps God did not intend there to be a boundary, and man had got it wrong. The classical and the biblical foundations of order in the universe were beginning to tremble. This is where the great Swedish naturalist and classifier Carl Linnaeus (1707–78) comes into the story. His classification and nomenclature of plants and animals – in which species are identified by two Latin or quasi-Latin names, a genus name followed by a species name, as in Homo sapiens – is still in use today.
In the controversy over the kingdoms he played a significant part through his passionate insistence that plants used a sexual form of reproduction, and that different parts of a plant could be called male and female. This undermined the idea of the boundary between plants and animals, although Linnaeus rather overdid it and scandalized many people by describing plants in human terms. They could love and marry, he said, and he called the petals of a flower a “sweet-scented bridal bed”.
Gibson briefly mentions some fall-outs from these arguments into other great issues. Some scientists who were looking more closely at the supposed animal-like way in which plants sought light and water – through so-called vital forces such as instinct and volition – began to reach quite opposite conclusions. A researcher called Thomas Knight, for instance, came to the revolutionary conclusion that it was simply gravity that caused roots to grow down, and that other plant motions were caused by similar mechanical forces. These ideas quickly gained credence and it began to be suggested that they even applied to animals. Theologians and clergy became anxious. What did this imply for God’s role in the universe? Politics also loomed up. Christians had been taught, in the words of a hymn verse written by one of the faithful a little later (and now always omitted in church):
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly
And ordered their estate.
If God’s order did not in fact rule the universe, how could people be expected to believe that any more? The abolition of the old classifications seemed to be pointing the way to political revolution.
Gibson does, unfortunately for her, have to face the fact that these forgotten disputes based on what was essentially ignorance of the facts have lost some of their savour and interest. The universal acceptance of evolution as a truth, and since then the far-reaching effects of the revolution in genetics, have swept all these arguments away. But she brings back to life some of the leading controversialists, and the still fascinating fervour and intelligence that they brought to trying to solve their problems. It is a pity that she did not give a little more space to bringing the story of classification up to date. For the record, it is now generally considered that there are five kingdoms of living things: animals, plants, fungi, amoeba-like organisms and bacteria. But some biologists have devised six- or even eight-kingdom models by splitting up the bacteria, for example, or granting a kingdom to certain kinds of algae.
So debates over classification, and reclassifications, still go on. One sphere in which this can have unexpected consequences is that of birds. Every so often a bird species which shows some distinct variations in plumage or behaviour is split into two distinct species and renamed accordingly. This happened recently when a portion of the herring gull population was turned into yellow-legged gulls. Alternatively, two species may be thought to be so close that they are lumped into a single species, and one name disappears. Birdwatchers, or twitchers, who compete with each other to spot the largest number of species in a year can sometimes wake up in the morning to find that, in the first case, they have gained a bird, or in the second case have lost one. Overnight, the order of classification of the twitchers has itself changed.