skull and XXX bones: homesteading the noösphere

«For several centuries, science, dominated by the Aristotelian impulse
to classify, neglected the modern impulse to search for ways in which
phenomena function. Indeed, with the plants and animals yet to be
explored, it is hard to see how biological science could have entered
a proprly dynamic period except through the continual gathering of
more descriptive natural history. The great botanist Linnaeus will
serve us as an example. For Linnaeus, species and genera were fixed
Aristotelian forms, rather than signposts for a process of evolution;
but it was only on the basis of a thoroughly Linnaean description that
any cogent case could ever be made for evolution. The early natural
historians were the practical frontiersmen of the intellect; too much
under the compulsion to seize and occupy new territory to be very
precise in treating the problem of explaining the new forms that they
had observed. After the frontiersman comes the operative farmer, and
after the naturalist comes the modern scientist.» -- The Human Use of
Human Beings, pp. 67-68, Norbert Wiener

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