55... I do not believe that we can yet demonstrate correspondences between the cognitive
statuses of folk taxa and the nomenclature applied to these which are of suffi cient intra- and
cross-cultural regularity to enable us to arrive at a simple typology. There is an obvious
danger in advancing, prematurely, a typology of the kind Dr. Berlin proposes, namely that
it may lead ethnographers and lexicographers to distort data by forcing it into inappropriate
pigeonholes, and in particular into failing to appreciate and record the degree of fl exibility
and elasticity which is probably a very general feature of folk taxonomies.
It would be foolish to try and argue that human cognition played little or no role
in determining the architecture of ethnobiological classifi cation s. However, an unbi-
ased appraisal of many, if not all, languages should reveal that cultural/ utilitarian
factors also have a signifi cant hand in determining not only what is named, but also
how it is to be named. As Bentley and Rodriguez [ 152 ] report on the naming of
insects in Honduras, cultural importance and cognitive constraints jointly infl uence
folk nomenclature. Such an idea is not new: according to Hays [ 153 ], folk classifi -
cations are “ products of a number of complex, interacting factors: biological dis-
continuities in nature, chance historical events, “utilitarian” human concerns,
human cultural concerns in a broader sense, intellectual curiosity, and constraints
deriving from the nature of human perception and cognition ”. It is entirely likely
that many of Berlin ’s rules do indeed operate in many languages, perhaps the major-
ity, but that simply makes them ‘tendencies’, and not ‘universals’. The fact that
several unrelated languages behave in the same way cannot be regarded as conclu-
sive—many unrelated languages use a base 10 numerical system, and indeed, the
existence of 10 fi ngers on all humans (a ‘perceptual universal’) may have contrib-
uted to the commonness of such systems [ 154 , 155 ]. However, genuine non-base-10
numerical systems, including those utilizing tallies on body parts other than the
fi ngers, are frequently reported by fi eldworkers [ 156 , 157 ]. Berlin has been criticised
for producing a “ universal model designed to accommodate all data; a model, into
which each analyst was expected to fi t his or her data ” ([ 14 ], p. 13), a model, which
has the aesthetic and intellectual appeal of making the data organized within its
frame look more coherent and tidy. The science of biology—also called the ‘science
of exceptions’ [ 158 ])—is at least as messy as the study of human languages and
cultures, but biologists are always careful to make room for exceptions. Perhaps, as
Kay and Regier [ 111 ] suggest, it is time to “ move the fi eld beyond a familiar rheto-
ric of ‘nature versus nurture’, or ‘universals versus relativity’, to new concepts and
new questions ”.