Book Extract | Every Living Thing by Jason Roberts

Excerpted with permission from the publisher Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life‎ Jason Roberts, published by Quercus Books/ Hachette India

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Can we build a system without objective bias?

Julian Huxley’s concept of cladistics, a taxonomy based on genetic diversion, seems to fit the bill, but there are complications. The boundary of cladogenesis—when one species population becomes incapable of breeding with its source species—is difficult to pinpoint, particularly in the fossil record: There is, as yet, no consistent means of identifying which aspects of genetic drift decisively affect reproduction. And reproduction itself is proving an increasingly fluid boundary. As we’ve discovered, many species have evolved means of thriving without resorting to conventional fertilization. Several kinds of salamanders and frogs are both unisexual and parthenogenic, their eggs developing without male intercession. Others survive through kleptogenesis, the “stealing” of sperm from the males of another species—a process that fertilizes the egg without incorporating the male’s genes. One spectacular instance of resourcefulness occurs in a cluster of five species of salamanders in the genus Ambystomia. Each species is unisexual, but together they form a reproductive complex, borrowing genes from each other to trigger reproduction while remaining distinct species.

Yet life is more resourceful still. We’ve also come to recognize that some species are not individual organisms but the interaction of several. Lichens, for instance, straddle two kingdoms. Linnaeus labeled lichens the rustici pauperini (poor trash) of the vegetable world, but placed them firmly in kingdom Plantae. In the late twentieth century, biologists discovered that most lichens are not a single species but a symbiotic colony of the fungus ascoycota (kingdom Fungi) and algae (kingdom Plantae). A more recent study established that at least some lichens incorporate a third organism, basidiomycete, which is a yeast. Far from being rustici pauperini, lichens display some of the most sophisticated interactions of life forms yet discovered.

Other boundaries in biological perception have begun to be dismantled. The blue whale, long considered Earth’s most massive life form, has been dwarfed by the discovery of a thirteen-million-pound organism dubbed Pando. A resident of central Utah since at least the last Ice Age, Pando is so enormous it occupies 108 acres. Yet it went unnoticed until 1976, when researchers from the University of Colorado found what appeared to be a forest of aspen trees was really forty thousand clones of the same tree, interconnected at the roots.

Pando is truly a single organism, as the clones do not propagate by seeding. Instead, when one tree begins to die it replenishes by sending signals through the root structure, and a new clone emerges. Biologists are both elated at the identification of Pando and frustrated that we failed to recognize it sooner; human incursion into its domain may have stopped its replenishment, leading to a slow decline and eventual death. While possibly the oldest organism, Pando is not the largest, although it was considered such until 2015, when a single instance of the honey mushroom fungus (Armillaria ostoyoe) was found to extend underground across 2,385 acres in Oregon’s Malheur National Forest. The “humongous fungus,” as it’s affectionately called, has since yielded the title to an even more recently perceived organism. In 2022, biologists determined that an underwater stand of Australian seagrass (Posidonia australis) constituted one specimen, sprouted some 4,500 years ago from a single seed. It’s now grown to slightly over 49,000 acres, or 64 percent larger than the city of San Francisco. Unless humans hinder it as they did Pando, it should continue to thrive and grow.

Humans have also been compelled to perceive ourselves as more than merely Homo sapiens. When the genome of Homo neanderthalensis was sequenced in 2010, researchers were surprised to find Neanderthal genes present in a large amount of the current population. Recent samples estimate that the average person of primarily European ancestry is, genetically speaking, 1.7 percent Neanderthal; those of primarily Eastern Asian ancestry, 1.83 percent. Even more surprisingly, those of primarily African descent have been found to have a genome averaging 0.5 percent Neanderthal—a paradigm-upsetting discovery, as Neanderthals are believed to have emerged outside that continent. It indicates that instead of a diaspora of Homo sapiens spreading outward from Africa, a significant number of our ancestors returned there after intermingling with Homo neanderthalensis.

Another species, Homo denisova, has also contributed to our gene pool. Despite the fact that our only evidence of the species was discovered in Siberia and Tibet, aboriginal Australians carry 3 to 5 percent Denisovian DNA in their genome. Natives of Papua New Guinea carry 7 to 8 percent. We are, on the whole, not only a hybrid of species but the result of several vectors of migration. Our ancestry appears “almost as a spider web of interactions,” concludes Omer Gokumen, a geneticist at the University of Buffalo, “rather than a tree with distinct branches.”

Further complicating matters is the evolution of evolution itself. While Darwin’s theory of natural selection—biological change through random mutations—has been abundantly confirmed through genomic analysis, the same analysis has led to the surprising return of Lamarck’s theory of directed variation. While it appears to remain true that an organism does not change in direct response to its environment— a giraffe cannot will itself to have a longer neck—researchers in 2003 determined that while environmental factors do not change genes, they can change the expression of those genes, activating some and deactivating others. Furthermore, at least some of these expression patterns appear capable of being passed on to subsequent generations, allowing Lamarck and Darwin to coexist after all.

In sum, life appears to exult in blurring the boundaries we place upon it. Buffon’s observation from two and a half centuries ago seems more relevant than ever.

This chain is not a simple thread which is only extended in length, it is a large web or rather a network, which, from interval to interval, casts branches to the side in order to unite with the networks of another order.

Not even Julian Huxley’s cladistics can meaningfully encapsulate all of life. While genome-sequencing technology gets faster and cheaper each year, it also produces cladistic connections that strain our ability to grasp at the larger whole. In classical taxonomy, birds presently remain in Linnaeus’s original class of Aves. In the separate Linnean class of Reptilia, alligators and crocodiles belong to the order Crocodylia, while lizards and snakes currently occupy the order Squa- mata.

Jason Roberts, Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life‎ Quercus Books/ Hachette India, 2024. Pb. Pp.432

The dramatic, globe-spanning and meticulously-researched story of two scientific rivals and their race to survey all life.

In the 18th century, two men dedicated their lives to the same daunting task: identifying and describing all life on Earth. Their approaches could not have been more different. Carl Linnaeus, a pious Swedish doctor with a huckster's flair, believed that life belonged in tidy, static categories. Georges-Louis de Buffon, an aristocratic polymath and keeper of France's royal garden, viewed life as a dynamic, ever-changing swirl of complexities. Both began believing their work to be difficult, but not impossible--how could the planet possibly hold more than a few thousand species? Stunned by life's diversity, both fell far short of their goal. But in the process, they articulated starkly divergent views on nature, on humanity's role in shaping the fate of our planet, and on humanity itself.

The rivalry between these two unique, driven individuals created reverberations that still echo today. Linnaeus, with the help of acolyte explorers he called "apostles" (only half of whom returned alive), gave the world such concepts as mammal, primate and Homo sapiens--but he also denied species change and promulgated racist pseudo-science. Buffon coined the term reproduction, formulated early prototypes of evolution and genetics, and argued passionately against prejudice. It was a clash that, during their lifetimes, Buffon seemed to be winning. But their posthumous fates would take a very different turn.

With elegant, propulsive prose grounded in more than a decade of research, bestselling author Jason Roberts tells an unforgettable true-life tale of intertwined lives and enduring legacies, tracing an arc of insight and discovery that extends across three centuries into the present day.Jason Roberts is the author of the national bestseller A Sense of the World, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, and named a best book of the year by the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Kirkus Reviews, and School Library Journal. The winner of the Van Zorn Prize for fiction (founded and awarded by Michael Chabon), he is a contributor to McSweeney's, The Believer, The Rumpus, and other publications, as well as editor of the bestselling 642 Things to Write About series. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Every Living Thing won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiography 2025.