Biology - Molecules and Cells

 Terms and Concepts 

SECTION 2

CHAPTER 2 - Taxonomy

Carl von Linne, a Swedish botanist known as Carolus Linnaeus (Latin was the common language for European science, so writings and often names were Latinized) worked within a system, developed by Georges Cuvier and others, that organized descriptive classification from the smallest of related groups up to the very largest.  The system, with revisions, is the basic system still used today to systematically organize types of living things into groupings with their relatives.  The basic structure was similar to how human organizations work, with groups-contained-within-groups, be they feudal power structures or military organizations.  Each particular type of living thing would be designated a species (from the same root word as "specific").  Closely-related species could be collected within a larger grouping, a genus; related genera are grouped into a family, families into an order, orders into a class, classes into a phylum, and phyla into a Kingdom, and Kingdoms would eventually becontained in a Domain, the biggest and most general group.  In Linnaeus' time, there were just the Animal Kingdom and the Plant Kingdom, but later discoveries convinced biologists (then called naturalists) that some distinct types of organisms, such as Fungi and some microscopic organisms, should be given their own separate Kingdoms.  Today, there are a great many "Kingdom Systems," they tend to vary by discipline.  That will make a bit more sense later.

Some subdisciplines of biology use a basic Linnaean type of taxonomy, but may change the names used for a few of the groups.  Commonly, for instance, plant and fungus taxonomy uses the term Division instead of Phylum.  In some systems, additional levels have been added as well, such as tribe or cohort.  Recently, there has been a bit of a movement to revamp the basic system to something called phylocode.

A page about Linnaeus.

A brief summary of Linnaean taxonomic levels.

Taxonomic levels of humans (video).

An introduction to phylocode.

 As you might see from the examples above, the system is a little more complicated than it sounded.  Sometimes, two or more groups are found to be more closely related than anyone thought;  they might be connected as supergroups ("super-" put on one of the level-group's name).  And sometimes a group is not as unified as was thought, and is split into subgroups, which in some systems can be further split into infragroups.

Taxonomy of mites and ticks, showing how sub- and supergroups fit in.

Biology, like the sciences in general, is produced by human beings who often disagree with each other's ideas and fight over what the "proper" labels should be.  For the most part, it is perfectly allowable for someone to say that this or that group should be a subphylum rather than a phylum, or a family rather than an order (this will come up later in the discussion about Kingdoms).  However, what is not allowed is to, on a whim, change the accepted name of a particular group - you can't say, "I don't like the genus Ursus for bears, I and everyone I work with are going to use Yogi from now on."  Once a group is named and the name accepted, it may be tossed about on the "classification ladder," but one must gain a broad consensus and acceptance before a group's actual name is changed (unless the assignment of the name itself broke the rules of the system).  If one book places sponges in their own Kingdom and one puts them in a phylum, in both cases the group will have the name Porifera;  this limits confusion when doing background research on organisms.

An abstract about the history of taxonomic disagreements over a type of bat.

Another set of rules, very much connected to Linnaeus, is called binomial nomenclature (2-name naming); it determines how species names are used.   You'll see in the examples that species names are two words:  a capitalized genus name and an uncapitalized specific.  The second word has no meaning by itself, and is never capitalized, not even if a proper noun is used as the source of the term.  Species names (and Genus names) are also treated as foreign words in English, meaning that they are italicized or underlined when printed or written.  The names of other taxonomic groups are often not italicized or underlined, but that usage seems to vary.  It is acceptable to use the genus name as the specific (uncapitalized) - this usually implies a species that is "typical" of the genus.

The basic rules.

There are actually a LOT more rules...

Typically, species names are abbreviated by making an initial of the first word and spelling out the second - you may be familiar with E. coli,  the abbreviated name of Escherichia coli, a common intestinal bacterium that, if introduced into an incompatible intestine, can cause food poisoning.

The first of several webpages of unusual species namings.

Deciding what living things should be classified together in the same group requires deciding what's related to what, and how close those relationships are.  Long ago, it was often done by lumping together analogous traits:  features used to do the same function.  This is why, in Biblical times, if they had finny structures and swam ("Beasts of the Water"), or wings and flew ("Creatures of the Air"), they belonged in the same groups.  By this approach, long wiggly things like snakes were grouped with earthworms and eels.  The evolutionary process that produces similar answers in different groups is called convergent evolution.

Images of analogous features (wings) where some are homologous (colored bones).

As more and more people studied Nature in detail, it became obvious that a butterfly's wings were very different structures than a bird's wings.  And sometimes, it could be seen that two structures used for very different functions - such as a human hand, a bat's wing and a whale's flipper - all contained the same internal architecture, with sometimes subtle changes in internal parts producing the outward changes.  Traits with similar internal structure are called homologous traits, and it was eventually decided that these traits were a better measure of relatedness than analogous traits.  Keep in mind, however, that traits can be both analogous and homologous (like a monkey hand and a human hand), it isn't automatically an either / or situation.  The evolutionary process that starts with similar structures but modifies them in different ways is called divergent evolution.

Image of homologous features.

One modern approach to classification is very focused on critical traits that arise and characterize a new family line - histories are based upon the spot in the past when a particular trait arises.  This approach is called cladistics.

A cladistic "tree."

Much basic taxonomy is still done anatomically, although the details used have gotten smaller through the use of microscopes and broader through the discoveries of genetics and biochemistry (molecules have anatomical structures, and can have analogy and homology).  These will be covered later as they come up in the historical journey.

The original two Kingdoms were Plantae and Animalia, which remained the only broadly-accepted Kingdoms until the middle of the 20th Century.  During the last 40-50 years, those groups have been splintered a bit - Fungi was split off from the plants, Protista removed the single-celled eukaryotes (and the problems of their often-combined characteristics) and Monera was made for the prokaryotes.  Those five Kingdoms were considered "the" Kingdoms in most basic biology books, even though the splintering has continued.  The latest basic books now recognize a sixth group, the Archaea, once thought to be odd monera / bacteria but now considered a fundamentally different group. 

Today's system (mostly in the plant and microbe areas) has added a Domain level above the Kingdoms;  most commonly, there are three domains.  The Monera and Archaea are each Domains, with the rest of the Kingdoms in the Eukaryota Domain.

Labels require definitions, and species is a very particular label that has been defined in different ways through the past.  It first just meant a distinctly-describable type;  then it was distinct types that could not interbreed;  then it was distinct types that could breed and produce offspring that themselves could go on as adults to breed (some crosses between species can produce young, such as horses and donkeys producing mules, but they grow up to be sterile adults).  Today, the best, latest nontechnical definition of species is...

Species:  A group that, in natural surroundings, breeds exclusively within the group.

In effect, we now let the organisms themselves determine what belongs to their species and what doesn't.  This still is not a great definition - it says nothing about asexual species.  And, like almost any biological definition, it still has exceptions, such as with coyotes, dogs, and wolves.  But it works fairly well.

Before long, there may be a strong attempt to define species genetically based upon molecular differences.  This sounds simple and mathematical, but it isn't;  don't expect a reliable standard any time soon.

A blog entry on the many different species concepts.

Why is this all so difficult?

Terms and Concepts

In the order they were covered.

   Carolus Linnaeus
System Organization Levels
"Newer" Kingdoms
Super- and Sub- groupings
Rules for disputes
Binomial nomenclature
Analogous traits
Homologous traits  
Cladistics
Modern 5-Kingdom System
Plantae
Animalia
Fungi
Monera
Protista  
Archaea
Determining Groups  
Monophyletic  
Polyphyletic  
Species definition