section_path: Commentary
section_name: Commentary
paragraph_text: Commentary
  
  Linnaeus wrote a description of himself in his autobiography Egenhändiga anteckningar af Carl Linnæus om sig sjelf : med anmärkningar och tillägg, which was published by his student Adam Afzelius in 1823:
  
  Linnaeus was not big, not small, thin, brown-eyed, light, hasty, walked quickly, did everything promptly, could not stand lateness; was quickly moved, sensitive, worked continuously; could not spare himself. He enjoyed good food, drank good drinks; but was never inebriated by them. He cared little for appearance, believed that the man should embellish the clothes and not vice versa. He was certainly not argumentative, so he never answered those who wrote against him, and said: If I am wrong, I will not win and if I am right, I will be shown to be right as long as Nature exists.
  
  Andrew Dickson White wrote in A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896):
  
  Linnaeus... was the most eminent naturalist of his time, a wide observer, a close thinker; but the atmosphere in which he lived and moved and had his being was saturated with biblical theology, and this permeated all his thinking.... Toward the end of his life he timidly advanced the hypothesis that all the species of one genus constituted at the creation one species; and from the last edition of his Systema Naturæ he quietly left out the strongly orthodox statement of the fixity of each species, which he had insisted upon in his earlier works.... warnings came speedily both from the Catholic and Protestant sides.
  
  The mathematical PageRank algorithm, applied to 24 multilingual Wikipedia editions in 2014, published in PLOS ONE in 2015, placed Carl Linnaeus at the top historical figure, above Jesus, Aristotle, Napoleon, and Adolf Hitler (in that order).
  
  In the 21st century, Linnæus's taxonomy of human "races" has been problematised and discussed. Some critics claim that Linnæus was one of the forebears of the modern pseudoscientific notion of scientific racism, while others hold the view that while his classification was stereotyped, it did not imply that certain human "races" were superior to others.