CSTMS Affiliate and Visiting Lecturer for the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley, Jordan Thomas Mursinna, has written an article for the Journal of the History of Biology.

Article Abstract | British systematics was distinctly marked by a raft of vituperative controversies around the turn of the 1830s. After the local collapse of broad consensus in the Linnaean system by 1820, the emergence of new schemes of classification—most notably, the “quinarian” system of William Sharp Macleay—brought with it an unprecedented register of public debate among zoologists in Britain, one which a young Charles Darwin would bitterly describe to his friend John Stevens Henslow in October 1836 as possessing a “mean quarrelsome spirit,” conducted in “a manner anything but like that of gentlemen.” This article aims to provide a social and conceptual account of the remarkable tenor of zoological discourse in Britain in the late 1820s and early 1830s, with joint attention to the philosophical and interpersonal commitments at play. In doing so, it analyzes three of the period’s most striking public controversies, each of which counted key advocates of the quinarian system as central participants.

For the full publication, please see here.