Bibliographic record
Abstract
THE LINNAEAN SYSTEM RECONSIDERED Three hundred years ago biological taxonomy was a chaotic discipline marked by miscommunication and misunderstanding. Biologists disagreed on the categories of classification, how to assign taxa to those categories, and even how to name taxa. Fortunately for biology, Linnaeus saw it as his divinely inspired mission to bring order to taxonomy. The system he introduced offered clear and simple rules for constructing classifications. It also contained rules of nomenclature that greatly enhanced the ability of biologists to communicate. Linnaeus's system of classification was widely accepted by the end of the eighteenth century. That acceptance brought order to a previously disorganized discipline. Furthermore, it laid the foundation for “the unprecedented flowering of taxonomic research” of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Mayr 1982, 173). Linnaeus himself seemed assured of his place in the history of biology. Consider the frontispiece of his Hortus Cliffortianus (1737) (Figure I.1). Linnaeus's youthful face is seen on the body of Apollo. In one hand he holds a light, in the other he pushes back the clouds of ignorance from crowned Mother Nature. With his foot Linnaeus tramples the dragon of falsehood. In the foreground, plants are brought for identification and two cherubs admire Linnaeus's centigrade thermometer. An exuberant illustration, and an immodest one – it was commissioned and approved by Linnaeus. The metaphors of the illustration are not completely unfounded; Linnaeus's work did usher in a golden era of biological classification.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.412 | 0.225 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".