Both Buffon and Linneas had been born in 1707. Both devoted themselves to compiling a massive work intended to capture the whole of nature, and neither succeeded. But there the resemblance ended. Linneaus was the foremost figure among the school of natural historians known as systematists, who prioritized naming and labeling above all other pursuits. Buffon was the leading practitioner of a more complex approach to nature - a perspective that, appropriately, he never saw the need to label. It may be be called complexism. (Prelude)

Importance: This opening framing establishes the book's central dialectic between two fundamentally opposed visions of scientific inquiry, both born from the same ambitious impossibility: capturing nature's totality. Roberts emphasizes their shared birth year and parallel failures to underscore that their divergence stems not from circumstance or capability, but from philosophical orientation. Linnaeus's systematist approach—prioritizing "naming and labeling above all other pursuits"—reflects a belief that nature...