"In this oversimplified view of scientific progress, we advance along a pathway of accumulating knowledge, guided by a timeless method of accurate observation and relentless logic. ... T. H. Huxley's The Crayfish... argues that the study of organisms has progressed through the same three stages followed by all sciences... an initial phase of gathering information without theoretical guidance (Huxley calls this... Natural History... "accurate, but necessarily incomplete and unmethodized knowledge"); a second stage of systemizing and organization... still without guiding theory (called Natural Philosophy); and... the... synthetic climax... Physical Science, "this final stage of knowledge, [where] the phenomena of nature are regarded as one continuous series of causes and effects." ...In this system... Linnaeus occupies the middle rung. ...I would agree with most modern historians of science in branding this... as misleading, and unfair... [T]wo aspects of this older positivist view... lack validity and impede understanding: ...the notion of a timeless based on rigorously objective observation and logic, and ...that earlier systems were either theory-free or theory-poor because explanation can only follow accurate description. Theory-free science makes about as much sense as value-free politics. Both... are oxymoronic. All thinking about the natural world must be informed by theory... The old... theories may have been wrong, but they were as persuasive (and restrictive) in the structuring of knowledge as any more accurate and later system... [W]e cannot collect information without a theory to organize our searches and observations."