Linnaeus creates life’s family tree for Darwinism.

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Darwin and Linnaeus, Linnaeus, Linnaeus and evolution, Linnaeus and Wallace

Linnaeus the father of the taxonomy upon which Darwinism is founded.

Carl Linnaeus was the grandfather of modern taxonomy and one of the grandfathers of modern ecology. It was his taxonomy which categorized things into an orderly hierarchical arrangement and named them according to a tree branching system. Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species.

Linnaeus' Philogenic Tree of Life with a modern upgrades and relative time-spacing.

His system of naming species published in Systema Naturae 1735 with a binomial nomenclature scheme is still used today. It is only today, 250 years later, that direct gene analysis is challenging details of its validity which require modifications on the original scheme. I hope the modern pundits don’t start mocking him because he didn’t satisfy current dogma as happened to Lamarck, Adam Smith and Malthus.

Taxonomy (the science of classification) is often undervalued as a glorified form of filing—with each species in its prescribed place in an album; but taxonomy is a fundamental and dynamic science, dedicated to exploring the causes of relationships and similarities among organisms. Classifications are theories about the basis of natural order, not dull catalogs compiled only to avoid chaos.” Stephen Jay Gould (1990, p.98)

Darwin's evolutionary tree upon which he based his evolutionary theory.

This was drawn in Darwin’s private notebook on the Transmutation of species in 1837. It appears to be no more than a sketch of Linnaeus’ schematic layout which by the time Darwin draws this picture is over one hundred years old. It doesn’t prove anything and many people at that time already believed in some sort of evolution and Linnaeus had clearly presented a general structure of its results. What they didn’t have was a functioning theory of the causal relationships of the factors that forced nature to create new species. Wallace, not Darwin, provided those theoretical underpinnings for what we now call Darwinism and mailed them to one of the greatest authorities on the subject, Darwin, whom Wallace requested to forward to the other authorities for consideration and possible publication. Darwin did forward it but was able to do so in a way that kept the credit for priority to himself. Had Wallace sent the exact same letter to Hooker or Lyell they, without doubt, would have given Wallace priority and Darwin would be know as the popularizer of the theory of natural selection .