Of trees, geese and cirripedes: man's quest for understanding

At least zoologists know that barnacles are arthropods rather than mollusks. However, this knowledge is surprisingly new, for it was as recent as 1830 before J. Vaughan Thompson showed, through a careful study of barnacle larvae, that they were crustaceans. In the 1850s, Charles Darwin unraveled much of the taxonomy of barnacles, and, significantly, his observations and classification of them follow the structure that was to be published later as his evolutionary theory. Irrespective of these works, knowledge of the systematic placement of barnacles remains surprisingly poor in the wider population today, with most non-biologists viewing barnacles as shallow-water fouling organisms related to oysters and limpets. The present paper reviews the way humans have perceived barnacles for at least a millennium; it evaluates why they were thought to have grown from trees and to have been part of the life cycle of birds; it concludes by contemplating the manner in which we perceive our environment and by doing so try to make sense of our world.