“Naming Nature”

Author and artist James Prosek will join evolutionary biologists and others from Yale and the Smithsonian Institution at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center on Friday for a symposium titled “Naming Nature: A conversation on the nature, uses and limitations of biological taxonomies.” As Nancy Burton of Agence France-Presse reports, it’s all about trying to answer the question Is the Linnean system still useful? and to determine whether the new PhyloCode — which traces ancestry through molecular biology — should replace it.