Evolutionary and psychological effects in pre-evolutionary classifications

Relative frequency of genera as a function of number of species per genus is plotted for six eighteenth-century classifications: Linnaeus' classifications of animals, plants, minerals, and diseases, and Sauvages' classifications of plants and diseases. The distributions for animals and plants form positively skewed hollow curves similar but not identical to those found in modern biological classifications and predicted by mathematical models of evolution. The distributions for minerals and diseases, however, are more nearly symmetric and convex. The difference between the eighteenth-century and modern classifications of animals and plants probably reflects psychological properties of the taxonomists' judgments; but the difference between the classifications of animals and plants and those of minerals and diseases reflects evolutionary properties of the materials classified, since all six classifications were constructed by the same taxonomists using the same methods. Consequently, the observable effects of evolution are strong enough to be detected in classifications constructed before the acceptance of evolutionary theory; and traditional classifications can contain substantial scientific information despite their reliance on incompletely understood processes of judgment.I thank Mae Ling Hum for assistance in data collection, and Dennis G. Fisher, David M. Raup, Thomas D. Wickens, and J. Arthur Woodward for helpful comments on earlier versions of the paper. Computer time was provided by the UCLA Office of Academic Computing.