Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.

My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.

As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.

What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,

poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.

If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds.

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

forward slash radio for. I hope you enjoy the program.

Hello the Argentinian author Jose Louis Bogez

illustrated the problematic nature of scientific classification when Jose Louis knowledge. On these remote pages in a complete absence of phylem, genus 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 vars and those that at a distance

who 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 Linaean 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.

...