Editing Carl Linnaeus (section)

==Commentary==

Linnaeus wrote a description of himself in his autobiography ''Egenhändiga anteckningar af Carl Linnæus om sig sjelf: med anmärkningar och tillägg'', which was published by his student [[Adam Afzelius]] in 1823:

{{blockquote |Linnaeus was not big, not small, thin, brown-eyed, light, hasty, walked quickly, did everything promptly, could not stand lateness; was quickly moved, sensitive, worked continuously; could not spare himself. He enjoyed good food, drank good drinks; but was never inebriated by them. He cared little for appearance, believed that the man should embellish the clothes and not vice versa. He was certainly not argumentative, so he never answered those who wrote against him, and said: If I am wrong, I will not win and if I am right, I will be shown to be right as long as Nature exists.<ref>Afzelius, A.; Linné, C. ''Egenhändiga anteckningar af Carl Linnæus om sig sjelf : med anmärkningar och tillägg'' Upsala, Palmblad & C, 1823 p.&nbsp;123 [https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/175268#page/179/mode/1up] [https://bioresurs.uu.se/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Linnelektioner_Linnaean_lessons_life_of_linnaeaus.pdf]</ref>}}

[[Andrew Dickson White]] wrote in ''[[A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom]]'' (1896):

{{blockquote |Linnaeus&nbsp;... was the most eminent naturalist of his time, a wide observer, a close thinker; but the atmosphere in which he lived and moved and had his being was saturated with biblical theology, and this permeated all his thinking.&nbsp;... Toward the end of his life he timidly advanced the hypothesis that all the species of one genus constituted at the creation one species; and from the last edition of his ''Systema Naturæ'' he quietly left out the strongly orthodox statement of the fixity of each species, which he had insisted upon in his earlier works.&nbsp;... warnings came speedily both from the Catholic and Protestant sides.<ref>[[Andrew Dickson White|White, Andrew Dickson]], ''History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom'' (1922) [https://archive.org/details/ahistorywarfare00whitgoog Vol.1] pp.&nbsp;59–61</ref>}}

The mathematical [[PageRank]] algorithm, applied to 24 multilingual Wikipedia editions in 2014, published in ''[[PLOS ONE]]'' in 2015, placed Carl Linnaeus at the top historical figure, above [[Jesus]], [[Aristotle]], [[Napoleon]], and [[Adolf Hitler]] (in that order).<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Eom |first1=Young-Ho |last2=Aragón |first2=Pablo |last3=Laniado |first3=David |last4=Kaltenbrunner |first4=Andreas |last5=Vigna |first5=Sebastiano |last6=Shepelyansky |first6=Dima L. |last7=Gao |first7=Zhong-Ke |title=Interactions of Cultures and Top People of Wikipedia from Ranking of 24 Language Editions |journal=PLOS ONE |year=2015 |volume=10 |issue=3 |pages=e0114825 |doi=10.1371/journal.pone.0114825 |pmid=25738291 |pmc=4349893 |arxiv=1405.7183 |bibcode=2015PLoSO..1014825E |doi-access=free}}</ref><ref>{{cite news |last1=Tamblyn |first1=Thomas |title=Wikipedia Reveals Most Influential Person in History, No It's Not Jesus |url=http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/06/12/wikipedia-most-influential-person-jesus_n_5487516.html |access-date=28 January 2016 |work=HuffPost |date=12 June 2014 |archive-date=2 February 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160202071628/http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/06/12/wikipedia-most-influential-person-jesus_n_5487516.html |url-status=live}}</ref>

In the 21st century, [[Scientific racism#Carl Linnaeus|Linnæus's taxonomy of human "races"]] has been criticized. Some claim that Linnæus was one of the forebears of the modern pseudoscientific notion of [[scientific racism]], while others hold the view that while his classification was stereotyped, it did not imply that certain human "races" were superior to others.<ref>Mazzolini, Renato G. (2014) Skin Color and the Origin of Physical Anthropology. in: Reproduction, Race, and Gender in Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences. Ed. Susanne Lettow.</ref><ref>Kennedy, Kenneth A.R. (1976), "Human Variation in Space and Time". Wm. C. Brown Company, p. 25. Kennedy writes that while ''"Linnaeus was the first to use biological traits as a basis for further subdivisions of the species into varieties. It would be unfair to ascribe racist motives to this effort."''</ref><ref>{{harvnb |Gould |1981 |p=67}}</ref><ref>Hastings, Rachel N. (2008), "Black Eyez: Memoirs of a Revolutionary", p. 17</ref><ref>{{cite magazine |last=Gould |first=Stephen Jay |author-link=Stephen Jay Gould |date=November 1994 |title=The Geometer of Race |url=https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/the-geometer-of-race |magazine=Discover |pages=65–69 |issn=0274-7529 |access-date=26 September 2022 |archive-date=20 January 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210120013339/https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/the-geometer-of-race |url-status=live }}</ref>