Linnaeus was a creationist

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Contents 1 Claim 2 Source 3 Responses 4 References 5 Fallacies contained in this claim 6 External Links 7 Related claims 8 See Also 9 Acknowledgments

Claim

Linnaeus was a creationist.

Source

• Morris, Henry M., 1982 (Jan.). Bible-believing scientists of the past. Impact 103. [1]

Responses

1. Linnaeus was a special creationist – that is, he believed that each species was created specially by God. He wrote:

   “There are as many species as the Infinite Being produced diverse forms in the beginning.�?(Species tot sunt diversae quot diversas formas ab initio creavit infinitum Ens, Fundamenta botanica No. 157, 1736).

   However, in 1744 he was forced to allow that some species are the result of hybridisation, at least in plants, because he observed it happening. A species of plant he placed in a genus Peloria (from the Greek pelor, meaning monstrosity) was in stem and leaf structure part of the genus Linaria ("toadflax"), but the flower was clearly different (Hagberg 1952; Glass 1959). Still, he thought that genera were real and the possibilities for change limited. According to Larson (1967), Linnaeus imagined in the Fundamenta fructifications “that God created one species for each natural order of plants differing in habit and fructification from all others. These species, mutually fertile, gave birth to as many genera as there were different parents, their fructification somewhat changed�? (p317).

   In the Pralectiones (1744), Linnaeus went further:

   The principle being accepted that all species of one genus have arisen from one mother through different fathers, it must be assumed:

   1. That in the beginning the Creator created each natural order only with one plant with reproductive power.
   2. That by their various mixings different plants have arisen which belong to the mother’s natural order as they are similar to the mother with regard to their fructifications, and are, as it were, species of the order, i.e., genera.
   3. We may assume that plants have arisen within the orders, i.e. by genera of one order, may mix with each other. In this way there will arise species that should be referred to the mother’s genus as her daughters. [quoted in Larson, loc. cit.]

   Linnaeus thus employed the Great Chain of Being in a rather unusual way. Most “chainists�? accepted what was later called the Principle of Plenitude (the lex completio), which stated that God would create everything that could be created, since he would not make an incomplete creation (Lovejoy 1936; Glass 1959). This usually meant that species graded into each other is a series of varieties. Linnaeus instead represented species using the metaphor of countries adjoining each other (in the Philosophia botanica §77). In his early writing, all the territory is pretty much filled – as he said, nature does not make jumps – but the countries are discrete and distinct from one another. In the later work, this strict fixism of the first edition of the Systema Naturae has been modified. All hybrids did was fill in a rare empty bit of territory in God’s time and plan. The borders were set by the genera, and all genera arose from a single species created by God. At the end of the 1750s, says Hagberg (1952), Linnaeus was in a state of perplexity with respect to species. In 1755, he published Metamorphosis plantarum, dealing primarily with the development of plants, but also with monstrosities and varieties. Such later hybrids he called the “children of time�? in an anonymous entry in a competition at St Petersburg in 1759 (Hagberg 1952). Hagberg says, “Linnaeus never succeeded in pin-pointing his new conception of species. But the old one, that formed the basis of Systema Naturae, was utterly and irrevocably abandoned.�?

2. Of course whether Linnaeus was a creationist is utterly unimportant regarding the question of whether the theory of evolution is true. Linnaeus died in 1778, 31 years (and a month) before Charles Darwin was born, let alone discovered the working of evolution. Therefore, Linnaeus couldn't have rejected evolution in favor of creationism. Rather, he lived in a time when creationism, of some sort, was the only explanation for life.
3. Linnaeus was not completely a creationist ,although he believed that all species of animals and humans were created separately by God he also believed that all plants evolved from a common ancestor.
4. add more responses

References

1. Glass, Bentley. 1959. Heredity and variation in the eighteenth century concept of the species. In Forerunners of Darwin, 1745-1859, edited by B. Glass, O. Temkin and W. L. Straus Jr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press.
2. Hagberg, Knut. 1952. Carl Linnaeus. Translated by A. Blair. London: Jonathan Cape.
3. Larson, James L. 1967. Linnaeus and the Natural Method. Isis 58 (3):304-320.
4. Lovejoy, Arthur O. 1936. The great chain chain of being: a study of the history of an idea. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Fallacies contained in this claim

• Appeal to Authority (Linnaeus' authority is irrelevant since he never heard of Darwin)

External Links

• Mark Isaak's page for this claim [2]
• CreationWiki's comments [3]

Related claims

• Many famous scientists were creationists
• Lord Kelvin was a creationist

See Also

Why is Creationism not a Scientific Theory?

Acknowledgments

• 130.102.200.141
• Thomas Kettenring