Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uk.

I hope you enjoy the program.

Hello, the Argentinian author Jose Louis Borres

illustrated the problematic nature of scientific classification

when he quoted from an ancient Chinese Encyclopedia,

the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent and Knowledge.

On these remote pages in a complete absence of phylem,

Genes, and species, animals are divided into A,

those that belong to the Emperor, B, embalmed ones, C, those that are trained, D, suckling pigs, and those

that tremble as if they were mad, ending with those drawn with a very fine camel's hairbrush, others,

those that have broken the flower vase and those that at a distance resemble flies.

Perhaps our own system of classifying the natural world might seem just as fantastical to a more knowing mind,

and perhaps underlying the Linnaian system that Homo sapiens currently finds useful,

there are prejudices of our own which distort the scientific truth.

With me to discuss how natural history classifies the natural order, the signs of taxonomy,

is the science writer Colin Todge, author of The Variety of Life,

Subtitled A Survey and Celebration of All the Creatures

that have Ever lived.

Dr. Sandy Knapp, a botanical taxonomist

from the Natural History Museum.

We're also joined by Henry G, whose book, Deep Time,

Cladistics, the Revolution in evolution,

...