By Jason Roberts 

Every Living Thing is a dramatic and insightful history of the 18th-century rivalry between Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis de Buffon, two radically different thinkers who both aimed to catalog all life on Earth. Linnaeus, a devout Swedish doctor, sought rigid classification, while Buffon, a French aristocrat and naturalist, saw nature as fluid and evolving. Though neither succeeded in their monumental task, their contrasting approaches laid the foundation for modern biology. Linnaeus introduced key scientific terms but upheld static views and racial pseudoscience; Buffon, more forward-thinking, anticipated ideas of evolution and climate change. Their intellectual battle shaped centuries of scientific thought, and Roberts tells their story through a rich narrative that spans generations of discovery.

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