Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life
by Jason Roberts
Summary
Jason Roberts follows two eighteenth century naturalists racing to do the same impossible thing, catalog and organize every living creature on Earth, and arriving at very different answers. The book follows Carl Linnaeus from rural Sweden into Uppsala University, where he built the hierarchical, two part naming system, genus and species together, that still structures how science names every organism today, publishing the idea first as a slim eleven page folio in 1735 and expanding it, edition after edition, until the tenth edition of 1758 classified around ten thousand species, roughly six thousand plants and more than four thousand animals.
Roberts follows Buffon, the French naturalist who ran the Jardin du Roi in Paris for nearly fifty years, as the philosophical opposite of Linnaeus's neat categories, rejecting rigid classification in favor of a thirty six volume Histoire Naturelle that treated nature as a web of relationships and continuous change rather than a fixed set of boxes, going so far as to estimate the Earth's actual age at over seventy five thousand years using his own cooling experiments, a claim that broke sharply from the far shorter timeline most of his contemporaries still assumed. The book follows the personal and intellectual rivalry between the two men across decades, tracing how their opposing visions of nature, one static and orderly, one dynamic and connected, together laid groundwork later naturalists, Darwin among them, would build on directly.
Roberts writes as a biographer of ideas as much as people, and reading the book means following two scientific temperaments in genuine competition rather than a single tidy history of taxonomy, each man convinced the other had gotten nature fundamentally wrong. It suits a reader curious how modern biology's basic vocabulary, the species names still used today, emerged out of an actual personal rivalry rather than quiet, uncontested consensus.
Historical Context & Significance
Every Living Thing won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, the second major biography from Jason Roberts, who had earlier written A Sense of the World, a life of the blind traveler James Holman that was itself a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.
The book drew reviews from the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Times Literary Supplement and the Wall Street Journal, with reviewers noting how directly Linnaeus and Buffon's rival systems paved the way for Darwin's own theory of evolution a century later. Roberts gives Buffon a full hearing in English, where Linnaeus has long been the better remembered of the two, and the book has become one of the standard narrative accounts of how modern taxonomy took shape. That year's finalists were David Greenberg's John Lewis: A Life and Amy Reading's The World She Edited, on Katharine S. White.