Almost Like a Whale

The problem of how to define Germans, or any nation, arises because the question is ambiguous: does it turn on shared appearance and behaviour, on geography, or on descent? Is a country an historical entity, or should it be identified only on criteria that apply today? How much can frontiers be allowed to leak before a nation loses its essence? When will Germans be seen as Europeans, as Prussians have become German?

Such problems of identity turn on natural variation, the raw material of evolutionary change. Like a politician, the twitcher has to deal not just with differences among individuals but with the subtle distinctions that separate each kind. The difficulty of how to define domestic breeds has been magnified and transferred to the world as a whole. Twitchers are asking a question older than the theory of evolution. How should they deal with forms that possess in some considerable degree the nature of species but are not classified as such?

Taxonomy, the science of ordering life, has to worry about that problem. Needless to say, many animals and plants are easy to tell apart. If they were not, birdwatching and natural history museums would each go out of business. One tribe in New Guinea recognizes a hundred and thirty-six kinds of bird, just one fewer than that accepted by the experts. Experts and tribesmen have the same philosophy. Each needs an archetype, a gold standard, to allow their specimens to be put in the correct cabinet.

Cracow University of Technology The scientific world didn't acknowledge its existence until they saw a stuffed one in 1928.

Once all taxonomists worked in the same way. An animal was killed and its remains stuffed, pinned or bottled. Then, it was described in the scientific literature. The cadaver was the 'type' against which others could be checked. In 1868, in China the French missionary Pere Armand David saw the skin of a black-legged white bear. It resembled animals shown in ancient works of art and until then assumed to be polar bears brought back from the north by hunters. The first specimen of the mysterious beast was collected in 1929 by Theodore and Kermit Roosevelt, the sons of the President. They shot a giant panda asleep under a tree. Its body gave the animal entry to the pantheon of mammals as Ailuropoda melanoleuca. It joined the world of science as had all its relatives, as a corpse.