This is the provocative title of a recent New York Times op-ed by science writer Richard Conniff.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/heroic-naturalists-or-imperialist-dogs/?emc=eta1
Conniff is responding to reader complaints about his statement that the nineteenth-century French naturalist Père Armand David had “discovered” the snub-nosed golden monkey. Rather, a reader suggests, the Chinese themselves discovered the monkey, since they were observing it for centuries, long before Europeans even knew there was a China.
Wrong, says Conniff. While it is true that early naturalists in China and elsewhere “displayed plenty of colonial arrogance,” their introduction of local knowledge of flora and fauna into today’s universally-used system of scientific classification is the only kind of knowledge that counts as “discovery.” “If David had not brought them to the attention of the outside world,” he asserts, “many of his new species—among them the giant panda—would in fact now be lost.”
He doesn’t give any evidence for this conclusion and it’s hard to imagine how you could possibly know for sure which events in the nineteenth century led directly to the preservation of the giant panda. Arguments like Conniff’s strive to seem reasonable, even-handed, and impartial, avoiding the “misguided” “revisionist appeal” of attempts to value local knowledge as its own kind of science. But in addition to dismissing the thousands of years of culture and civilization lying behind the work of the uncredited Chinese hunters who brought David his specimens, Conniff’s approach fails to see that “scientific knowledge” has a history that has shaped it in peculiar ways we often fail to recognize because we are inside that history.
(Père Armand David in European and Chinese dress. He wore the latter to facilitate his explorations.)
For example, when the Linnaean system of sexual classification was first introduced into England in the 18th century, it created a backlash against its perceived sexual immorality. Women botanists such as Mary Delany and the Duchess of Portland, who identified their specimens by how they reproduced, were considered to be doing something scandalously sexual. Delany’s Magnolia Grandiflora and Papaver Somniferum were the kinds of images critics called “libertine” because they emphasized the plant’s reproductive features. Turning the flower outward toward the viewer, as Delany does, made these images uncomfortably close to women’s sexual anatomy for many eighteenth-century viewers.
Landscape poet Anna Seward, later in the century, signaled her radical politics and support of women’s education by criticizing those who thought the purity of young women would be ruined by investigating plants. “Do not suppose,” she scoffed, “that a virtuous girl, or young married woman, could be induced…to imitate the involuntary libertinism of a fungus or a flower.”
Conniff would say that since we no longer believe this, the system works. I would say it simply shows that Western scientific traditions have their own blind spots and should not be uncritically celebrated as universal.
The binomial system of nomenclature that descends from the eighteenth century's Linnaenism is what Conniff calls "giving your find a name, by genus and species." This, for him, is the only activity that counts as "discovery." Before David, Europeans who had seen pictures of the mountain-dwelling monkeys, with their blue, snubbed noses and bright red manes, believed them to be a figment of the Chinese imagination. Conniff says it was the French priest who proved them wrong. How ironic that he did so using a system regarded as immoral by many Europeans. And how unfortunate that the Chinese themselves, and the scientific, literary and pictorial records they created, were seen as fictional, while "the involuntary libertinism of a fungus" is considered impartial knowledge.
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