During our visit at the Botanical Garden in Pisa, director Fabio Garbari used a scientific instrument like the lens to illustrate the different attitudes of a biologist and a naturalist, when they look through it to observe an object of inquiry like an insect.
According to Garbari, the biologist usually looks at an insect as a member of its species, an exemplar that instantiates the main phenotypical features of the species it belong to. So the biologist’s eye is more concerned with and focused on classification and taxonomy from a “top-down” perspective. For him individuality inevitably deviates from the species as an “archetypus”.
On the contrary, the naturalist has a more pragmatic way of dealing with taxa, because his eye pays more attention to the exemplar itself, different from all the other ones, despite the fact that they all belong to the same species or genus. So taxonomy, from the naturalist’s “bottom-up” perspective, is a more complicated thing, necessary but constantly open to exceptions and revisions.
One could recognize a biologist or a naturalist simply through the way they handle a lens and from their observational attitude. A biologist would have a more detached and theoretical approach, while the naturalist would show a typical curiosity for the empirical detail.
It was a joke, of course, made by a naturalist reflecting about the increasing disciplinary and methodological distance between the tradition of natural history and the contemporary biomedical sciences. One could ask, however, if the latter ones cannot challenge even more our criteria of classification, from the more fundamental level of genetics and evolutionary molecular biology.
In any case, I found this comparison stimulating both from a historical and a philosophical point of view, especially concerning the relationship among eyes, instruments, and objects in scientific observation.