Heroic Naturalists or Imperialist Dogs?
What does it mean to discover a species? Who should get the credit for it? Why did early naturalists think it worth risking their lives, and often losing them, to ship home the first specimens of a previously unknown butterfly or bat? These turn out to be tangled questions, and it is easy to get stuck on the thorns.
Not long ago, for instance, I wrote that a 19th-century French missionary and naturalist in China, Pére Armand David, had “discovered” the snub-nosed golden monkey. A reader sent me this somewhat testy comment: “The answer to the question ‘who discovered it’ is actually the Chinese.” Père David had merely “observed it and introduced it (and many other animals) to the West and into the Western zoological system.”
George Wong/European Pressphoto Agency A male snub-nosed golden monkey.My irritated reader had a point, of a misguided sort. It’s common these days to dismiss the scientific classification and naming of “new” species as just one more Western appropriation of other peoples’ natural resources, and the golden [...]~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Richard Conniff’s work has appeared in Smithsonian, National Geographic, Time, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and on National Public Radio. He is the author of several books, most recently, “The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth.” He blogs at strangebehaviors.com. Twitter: @RichardConniff.
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