Every Living Thing

In Every Living Thing, Pulitzer Prize winner Jason Roberts delves into the lives of Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis de Buffon, two eighteenth-century contemporaries who both aimed to catalog all of Earth's life yet held starkly opposing views on nature and humanity. Linnaeus, with his methodical approach, established foundational categories of life while simultaneously promoting dangerous pseudoscience, whereas Buffon championed ideas of evolution and climate change, advocating against prejudice. This compelling narrative explores their legacies and the fierce scientific rivalry that shaped the development of biology over three centuries.