God and Taxonomy

This is one of the pieces by Ken Brown I mentioned earlier.  Links in the original removed:-

Naming the animals

a meditation on the first two chapters of the Bible

Imagine the Last Judgement...

All of humanity is standing on the shores of the glassy sea, before a great throne on a pavement of sapphire. The saints and angels are arrayed in glorious ranks. One like a Son of Man is sitting on the throne. Books are opened. The people are looking very, very worried.
And God says:

How did you get on with fulfilling my commandments?

And the people reply:

"Which commandments are they, Lord?"

You know. The ones in the Bible. There are only about 360 of them. Let's take them one by one...

More books are opened. The humans remind themselves of what's in Genesis chapter one and begin to look a little more optimistic

"Well, we did the first one! 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth'. We got that one under our belts. "

Good. That's about a third of a percent. Now let's look at chapter two. 'Eat plants'. Well, by the look of you most of you have been doing that alright. But not all of you. Some of you starved to death and got here early. Didn't I make enough plants? Don't answer that, it was a rhetorical question.

Next: do not eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. I think we all know how that turned out. What was next? Ah, here we are... Genesis chapter 2 and verse 19... Have you finished naming my animals yet?"

And the people looked around for someone who could name animals. After a while they found some taxonomists, who are an insignificant and harmless folk, mostly overlooked by the Great and the Powerful. They tend to be shabby and bearded and are much given to burrowing around in the earth, quaffing ale, and having long arguments in dead languages about matters no-one else understands or cares.

A great many more books were opened, mostly with one-page descriptions of an extremely large number of animals. Each one had a name; mostly in rather bad Greek with Latin spellings; a few words about what the name meant - a lot of the husbands and wives of the taxonomists seemed to be remembered, not to mention their schools, their favourite rock bands, a large number of obscure villages in China and Sweden and the presents their daughters gave to them for their forty-second birthdays - and each page had a short description of how the animal was found and why it was, or wasn't different from some other animal. Sometimes there were pictures, mostly of somewhat improbable-looking genitalia. More than a million of the animals were insects of one kind or another, usually beetles.

In a distant corner of the throne room some rather tipsy Belgians started arguing about whether Ecribellate spiders were or were not polyphyletic

"Lord, we seem to have named about three million of them. You do seem to be inordinately fond of beetles".

I will be fond of whom I will be fond. But only three million? Where are the rest? I made at least ten times that number.

The people start to look very worried.

"Well, er, Lord, er we, that is they, that is the others really, not us of course, well I suppose it was us really, they made us do it, we..."

Get to the point!

"We killed most of them."

You killed my beetles?

"Not specially the beetles, Lord. Mostly we killed the trees, and the beetles just sort of disappeared."

What about the mites ?

"We didn't really get round to naming them. We're rather sorry but the ecosystem just sort of came apart in our hands. Most of the mites had already vanished before we got round to them."

And the spiders ?

"Yeeuch! We hate spiders."

Why? They never did you any harm. I didn't create them just so you could hate them.

"The Aschelminths caused us a lot of trouble!"

piped up a particularly brave - or foolish - parasitologist

Well, you might have a point there. But the people they infected were mainly my poor little ones that you kept in poverty and oppression while the rich added field to field. The Earth, and the fullness therof, was after all mine, not yours. If you hadn't kept the poor from the land they could have used to feed themselves they would have been healthy enough to resist the infections. And the Aschelminths weren't all bad - what about the Rotifers, Acanthocephalans, Gastrotrichs, Kinorhynchs, Loricerferans and Tardigrades ? I quite liked the Tardigrades, they were cute. Anyway, most of the wormy sort of things were completely harmless - what about the Pogonophora? The Entoproctans? The Chaetognatha? And you never really started on the Priapulids, Cycliophora, Sipunculans and Echiurans - you barely got 500 of them all put together.

"We never even realised most of those existed, Lord."

Nobody's mentioned the Urochordates yet I see. Or the Pycnogonids, Amblypigi, Uropigi, Opiliones - OK, I realise the Opiliones were a bit silly, but so were the Collembolans and all you did was spray pesticide on them. Which you would not have needed to do if you hadn't already driven the spiders out of your houses.

The taxonomists carried on arguing amongst themselves. Everyone else began to look very sheepish. At least most of them could remember what sheep looked like.

... and the Gastropods, Scaphopods and Cephalopods...

A long time later - in so far as there is time in the heavenly places - the list was finished. There was silence in heaven for a while

I don't think this is going very well, is it?