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Part of a series on
Evolutionary biology
Key topics[show]
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Social implications[show]
Contents
1Definition
o 1.1Monograph and taxonomic revision
o 1.2Alpha and beta taxonomy
o 1.3Microtaxonomy and macrotaxonomy
2History
o 2.1Pre-Linnaean
2.1.1Early taxonomists
2.1.2Ancient times
2.1.3Medieval
2.1.4Renaissance and Early Modern
o 2.2The Linnaean era
3Modern system of classification
o 3.1Kingdoms and domains
o 3.2Recent comprehensive classifications
4Application
o 4.1Classifying organisms
o 4.2Taxonomic descriptions
o 4.3Author citation
5Phenetics
6Databases
7See also
8Notes
9References
10Bibliography
11External links
Definition[edit]
The exact definition of taxonomy varies from source to source, but the core of the
discipline remains: the conception, naming, and classification of groups of organisms.
[1]
As points of reference, recent definitions of taxonomy are presented below:
History[edit]
While some descriptions of taxonomic history attempt to date taxonomy to ancient
civilizations, a truly scientific attempt to classify organisms did not occur until the 18th
century. Earlier works were primarily descriptive and focused on plants that were useful
in agriculture or medicine. There are a number of stages in this scientific thinking. Early
taxonomy was based on arbitrary criteria, the so-called "artificial systems", including
Linnaeus's system of sexual classification. Later came systems based on a more
complete consideration of the characteristics of taxa, referred to as "natural systems",
such as those of de Jussieu (1789), de Candolle (1813) and Bentham and
Hooker (1862–1863). These were pre-evolutionary in thinking. The publication
of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) led to new ways of thinking about
classification based on evolutionary relationships. This was the concept
of phyletic systems, from 1883 onwards. This approach was typified by those
of Eichler (1883) and Engler (1886–1892). The advent of molecular genetics and
statistical methodology allowed the creation of the modern era of "phylogenetic
systems" based on cladistics, rather than morphology alone.[19][page needed][20][page needed][21][page needed]
Pre-Linnaean[edit]
Early taxonomists[edit]
Naming and classifying our surroundings has probably been taking place as long as
mankind has been able to communicate. It would always have been important to know
the names of poisonous and edible plants and animals in order to communicate this
information to other members of the family or group. Medicinal plant illustrations show
up in Egyptian wall paintings from c. 1500 BC, indicating that the uses of different
species were understood and that a basic taxonomy was in place. [22]
Ancient times[edit]
Further information: Aristotle's biology § Classification
Description of rare animals (写生珍禽图), by Song dynasty painter Huang Quan (903–965)
Organisms were first classified by Aristotle (Greece, 384–322 BC) during his stay on
the Island of Lesbos.[23][24][25] He classified beings by their parts, or in modern
terms attributes, such as having live birth, having four legs, laying eggs, having blood,
or being warm-bodied.[26] He divided all living things into two groups: plants and animals.
[24]
Some of his groups of animals, such as Anhaima (animals without blood, translated
as invertebrates) and Enhaima (animals with blood, roughly the vertebrates), as well as
groups like the sharks and cetaceans, are still commonly used today.[27] His
student Theophrastus (Greece, 370–285 BC) carried on this tradition, mentioning some
500 plants and their uses in his Historia Plantarum. Again, several plant groups
currently still recognized can be traced back to Theophrastus, such as Cornus, Crocus,
and Narcissus.[24]
Medieval[edit]
Taxonomy in the Middle Ages was largely based on the Aristotelian system,[26] with
additions concerning the philosophical and existential order of creatures. This included
concepts such as the Great chain of being in the Western scholastic tradition,[26] again
deriving ultimately from Aristotle. Aristotelian system did not classify plants or fungi, due
to the lack of microscope at the time,[25] as his ideas were based on arranging the
complete world in a single continuum, as per the scala naturae (the Natural Ladder).
[24]
This, as well, was taken into consideration in the Great chain of being. [24] Advances
were made by scholars such as Procopius, Timotheos of Gaza, Demetrios
Pepagomenos, and Thomas Aquinas. Medieval thinkers used abstract philosophical
and logical categorizations more suited to abstract philosophy than to pragmatic
taxonomy.[24]
Renaissance and Early Modern[edit]
During the Renaissance, the Age of Reason, and the Enlightenment, categorizing
organisms became more prevalent,[24] and taxonomic works became ambitious enough
to replace the ancient texts. This is sometimes credited to the development of
sophisticated optical lenses, which allowed the morphology of organisms to be studied
in much greater detail. One of the earliest authors to take advantage of this leap in
technology was the Italian physician Andrea Cesalpino (1519–1603), who has been
called "the first taxonomist".[28] His magnum opus De Plantis came out in 1583, and
described more than 1500 plant species.[29][30] Two large plant families that he first
recognized are still in use today: the Asteraceae and Brassicaceae.[31] Then in the 17th
century John Ray (England, 1627–1705) wrote many important taxonomic works.
[25]
Arguably his greatest accomplishment was Methodus Plantarum Nova (1682),[32] in
which he published details of over 18,000 plant species. At the time, his classifications
were perhaps the most complex yet produced by any taxonomist, as he based his taxa
on many combined characters. The next major taxonomic works were produced
by Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (France, 1656–1708).[33] His work from
1700, Institutiones Rei Herbariae, included more than 9000 species in 698 genera,
which directly influenced Linnaeus, as it was the text he used as a young student. [22]
The Linnaean era[edit]
Main article: Linnaean taxonomy
Whereas Linnaeus aimed simply to create readily identifiable taxa, the idea of
the Linnaean taxonomy as translating into a sort of dendrogram of the animal and
plant kingdoms was formulated toward the end of the 18th century, well before On the
Origin of Species was published.[25] Among early works exploring the idea of
a transmutation of species were Erasmus Darwin's 1796 Zoönomia and Jean-Baptiste
Lamarck's Philosophie Zoologique of 1809.[12] The idea was popularized in the
Anglophone world by the speculative but widely read Vestiges of the Natural History of
Creation, published anonymously by Robert Chambers in 1844.[40]
With Darwin's theory, a general acceptance quickly appeared that a classification
should reflect the Darwinian principle of common descent.[41] Tree of life representations
became popular in scientific works, with known fossil groups incorporated. One of the
first modern groups tied to fossil ancestors was birds.[42] Using the then newly discovered
fossils of Archaeopteryx and Hesperornis, Thomas Henry Huxley pronounced that they
had evolved from dinosaurs, a group formally named by Richard Owen in 1842.[43][44] The
resulting description, that of dinosaurs "giving rise to" or being "the ancestors of" birds,
is the essential hallmark of evolutionary taxonomic thinking. As more and more fossil
groups were found and recognized in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, palaeontologists worked to understand the history of animals through the
ages by linking together known groups.[45] With the modern evolutionary synthesis of the
early 1940s, an essentially modern understanding of the evolution of the major groups
was in place. As evolutionary taxonomy is based on Linnaean taxonomic ranks, the two
terms are largely interchangeable in modern use. [46]
The cladistic method has emerged since the 1960s.[41] In 1958, Julian Huxley used the
term clade.[12] Later, in 1960, Cain and Harrison introduced the term cladistic. [12] The
salient feature is arranging taxa in a hierarchical evolutionary tree, ignoring ranks.[41] A
taxon is called monophyletic, if it includes all the descendants of an ancestral form. [47]
[48]
Groups that have descendant groups removed from them are termed paraphyletic,
[47]
while groups representing more than one branch from the tree of life are
called polyphyletic.[47][48] The International Code of Phylogenetic
Nomenclature or PhyloCode is intended to regulate the formal naming of clades.[49]
[50]
Linnaean ranks will be optional under the PhyloCode, which is intended to coexist
with the current, rank-based codes.[50]
Kingdoms and domains[edit]
The basic scheme of modern classification. Many other levels can be used; domain, the highest level within life,
is both new and disputed.
2 3 4 5 2 empires, 6 2 empires, 7
2 empires 3 domains
kingdoms kingdoms kingdoms kingdoms kingdoms kingdoms
Bacteria Bacteria
Prokaryota Monera Monera Bacteria
(not Archaea Archaea
Protista
treated) Protozoa Protozoa
Protoctista Protista
Chromista Chromista
Eukaryota Plantae Eucarya Plantae Plantae
Vegetabilia Plantae Plantae
Fungi Fungi Fungi
Animalia Animalia Animalia Animalia Animalia Animalia
Main article: Kingdom (biology) § Summary
Recent comprehensive classifications[edit]
Partial classifications exist for many individual groups of organisms and are revised and
replaced as new information becomes available; however, comprehensive, published
treatments of most or all life are rarer; recent examples are that of Adl et al., 2012 and
2019,[63][64] which covers eukaryotes only with an emphasis on protists, and Ruggiero et
al., 2015,[65] covering both eukaryotes and prokaryotes to the rank of Order, although
both exclude fossil representatives.[65] A separate compilation (Ruggiero, 2014)[66] covers
extant taxa to the rank of family. Other, database-driven treatments include
the Encyclopedia of Life, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, the NCBI
taxonomy database, the Interim Register of Marine and Nonmarine Genera, the Open
Tree of Life, and the Catalogue of Life. The Paleobiology Database is a resource for
fossils.
Application[edit]
Biological taxonomy is a sub-discipline of biology, and is generally practiced by
biologists known as "taxonomists", though enthusiastic naturalists are also frequently
involved in the publication of new taxa.[67] Because taxonomy aims to describe and
organize life, the work conducted by taxonomists is essential for the study
of biodiversity and the resulting field of conservation biology.[68][69]
Classifying organisms[edit]
Main article: Taxonomic rank
Biological classification is a critical component of the taxonomic process. As a result, it
informs the user as to what the relatives of the taxon are hypothesized to be. Biological
classification uses taxonomic ranks, including among others (in order from most
inclusive to least
inclusive): Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species,
and Strain.[70][note 1]
Taxonomic descriptions[edit]
See also: Species description
1. The taxon must be given a name based on the 26 letters of the Latin
alphabet (a binomial for new species, or uninomial for other ranks).
2. The name must be unique (i.e. not a homonym).
3. The description must be based on at least one name-
bearing type specimen.
4. It should include statements about appropriate attributes either to
describe (define) the taxon or to differentiate it from other taxa (the
diagnosis, ICZN Code, Article 13.1.1, ICN, Article 38). Both codes
deliberately separate defining the content of a taxon (its circumscription)
from defining its name.
5. These first four requirements must be published in a work that is
obtainable in numerous identical copies, as a permanent scientific record.
However, often much more information is included, like the geographic range of the
taxon, ecological notes, chemistry, behavior, etc. How researchers arrive at their taxa
varies: depending on the available data, and resources, methods vary from
simple quantitative or qualitative comparisons of striking features, to elaborate computer
analyses of large amounts of DNA sequence data.[74]
Author citation[edit]
Main articles: Author citation (botany) and Author citation (zoology)
An "authority" may be placed after a scientific name. [75] The authority is the name of the
scientist or scientists who first validly published the name. [75] For example, in 1758
Linnaeus gave the Asian elephant the scientific name Elephas maximus, so the name is
sometimes written as "Elephas maximus Linnaeus, 1758".[76] The names of authors are
frequently abbreviated: the abbreviation L., for Linnaeus, is commonly used. In botany,
there is, in fact, a regulated list of standard abbreviations (see list of botanists by author
abbreviation).[77] The system for assigning authorities differs slightly
between botany and zoology.[8] However, it is standard that if the genus of a species has
been changed since the original description, the original authority's name is placed in
parentheses.[78]
Phenetics[edit]
Main article: Phenetics
In phenetics, also known as taximetrics, or numerical taxonomy, organisms are
classified based on overall similarity, regardless of their phylogeny or evolutionary
relationships.[12] It results in a measure of evolutionary "distance" between taxa. Phenetic
methods have become relatively rare in modern times, largely superseded by cladistic
analyses, as phenetic methods do not distinguish common ancestral (or plesiomorphic)
traits from new common (or apomorphic) traits.[79] However, certain phenetic methods,
such as neighbor joining, have found their way into cladistics, as a reasonable
approximation of phylogeny when more advanced methods (such as Bayesian
inference) are too computationally expensive. [80]
Databases[edit]
Main article: Taxonomic database
Modern taxonomy uses database technologies to search and catalogue classifications
and their documentation.[81] While there is no commonly used database, there are
comprehensive databases such as the Catalogue of Life, which attempts to list every
documented species.[82] The catalogue listed 1.64 million species for all kingdoms as of
April 2016, claiming coverage of more than three quarters of the estimated species
known to modern science.[83]
See also[edit]
Automated species identification
Bacterial taxonomy
Cladogram
Cluster analysis
Consortium for the Barcode of Life
Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities
Dendrogram
Genetypes
Glossary of scientific naming
Identification (biology)
Incertae sedis
Open Tree of Life
Phenogram
Set theory
Taxonomy (general)
Virus classification
Notes[edit]
1. ^ This ranking system can be remembered by the mnemonic "Do Kings Play Chess On Fine
Glass Sets?"
References[edit]
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External links[edit]
Look up taxonomy in
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Carl Linnaeus
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Systema Naturae (1735)
Fundamenta Botanica (1736)
Bibliotheca Botanica (1736)
Musa Cliffortiania (1736)
Critica Botanica (1737)
Flora Lapponica (1737)
Genera Plantarum (1737)
Hortus Cliffortianus (1737)
Classes Plantarum (1738)
Flora Svecica (1745)
Fauna Svecica (1746)
Philosophia Botanica (1751)
Species Plantarum (1753)
Centuria Insectorum (1763)
Systema Vegetabilium (1774)
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