Your article on competition among flowers (“Flower-Power!”, 9 February, p 22) implies that sociobiology is a new development.
In fact, Linnæus’s Systema Naturæ produced a precursor with his “sexual system”, which had an elaborate typology of plants based on the disposition of their reproductive parts. It used the analogy of human sexual relations, including polygamy, clandestine marriages, husband and wife having separate beds, many males in one bed, and so on.
It was soon replaced by a more “natural” principles of classification, but not before outraged scientists had attacked Linnæus’s method as “lewd” and “lascivious”, saying that the Creator would never have allowed such “loathsome harlotry” as several males to one female. One commentator said that no textbook of botany should “bring the blush of injured modesty to the cheeks of the innocent fair”.
F.C.T. Moore
The University of Hong Kong