Biological classification
Encyclopedia
Biological classification, or scientific classification in biology, is a method to group and categorize organism
s by biological type
, such as genus
or species
. Biological classification is part of scientific taxonomy
.
Modern biological classification has its root in the work of Carolus Linnaeus
, who grouped species according to shared physical characteristics. These groupings have since been revised to improve consistency with the Darwinian
principle of common descent
. Molecular phylogenetics, which uses DNA sequences as data, has driven many recent revisions and is likely to continue to do so. Biological classification belongs to the science of biological systematics
.
What makes biological classification different from other classification systems (e.g. classifying books in a library) is evolution: the similarity between organisms placed in the same taxon is not arbitrary, but is instead a result of shared descent from their nearest common ancestor. Accordingly, the important attributes or traits for biological classification are 'homologous
', i.e., inherited from common ancestors. These must be separated from traits that are analogous
. Thus birds and bats both have the power of flight, but this similarity is not used to classify them into a taxon (a "class"), because it is not inherited from a common ancestor. In spite of all the other differences between them, the fact that bats and whales both feed their young on milk is one of the features used to classify both of them as mammals, since it was inherited from a common ancestor(s).
Determining whether similarities are homologous or analogous can be difficult. Thus until recently, golden mole
s, found in South Africa, were placed in the same taxon (insectivore
s) as Northern Hemisphere
moles
, on the basis of morphological and behavioural similarities. However, molecular analysis has shown that they are not closely related, so that their similarities must be due to convergent evolution and not to shared descent, and so should not be used to place them in the same taxon.
: kingdom, phylum/division, class, order, family, genus, species. "Domain", a level above kingdom, has become popular in recent years, but has not been accepted into the codes.
The most basic rank is that of species
, the next higher is genus
, and then family
. Ranks are somewhat arbitrary, but hope to encapsulate the diversity contained within a group — a rough measure of the number of diversifications that the group has been through.
The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature
defines rank, in the nomenclatural sense, as:
There are slightly different ranks for zoology and for botany, including subdivisions such as tribe
.
descend from the thought presented by the Greek philosopher Aristotle
, who published in his metaphysical
works the first known classification of everything whatsoever, or "being". This is the scheme that gave such words as 'substance', 'species' and 'genus' and was retained in modified and less general form by Linnaeus.
Aristotle also studied animals and classified them according to method of reproduction, as did Linnaeus later with plants. Aristotle's animal classification was eventually made obsolete by additional knowledge and forgotten.
The philosophical classification is in brief as follows: Primary substance is the individual being; for example, Peter, Paul, etc. Secondary substance is a predicate that can properly or characteristically be said of a class of primary substances; for example, man of Peter, Paul, etc. The characteristic must not be merely in the individual; for example, being skilled in grammar. Grammatical skill leaves most of Peter out and therefore is not characteristic of him. Similarly man (all of mankind) is not in Peter; rather, he is in man.
Species is the secondary substance that is most proper to its individuals. The most characteristic thing that can be said of Peter is that Peter is a man. An identity is being postulated: "man" is equal to all its individuals and only those individuals. Members of a species differ only in number but are totally the same type.
Genus is a secondary substance less characteristic of and more general than the species; for example, man is an animal, but not all animals are men. It is clear that a genus contains species. There is no limit to the number of Aristotelian genera that might be found to contain the species. Aristotle does not structure the genera into phylum
, class, etc., as the Linnaean classification does.
The secondary substance that distinguishes one species from another within a genus is the specific difference. Man can thus be comprehended as the sum of specific differences (the "differentiae" of biology) in less and less general categories. This sum is the definition; for example, man is an animate, sensate, rational substance. The most characteristic definition contains the species and the next most general genus: man is a rational animal. Definition is thus based on the unity problem: the species is but one yet has many differentiae.
The very top genera are the categories
. There are ten: one of substance and nine of "accidents", universals that must be "in" a substance. Substances exist by themselves; accidents are only in them: quantity, quality, etc. There is no higher category, "being", because of the following problem, which was only solved in the Middle Ages
by Thomas Aquinas
: a specific difference is not characteristic of its genus. If man is a rational animal, then rationality is not a property of animals. Substance therefore cannot be a kind of being because it can have no specific difference, which would have to be non-being.
The problem of "being" occupied the attention of scholastics during the time of the Middle Ages. The solution of St. Thomas, termed the analogy of being, established the field of ontology
, which received the better part of the publicity and also drew the line between philosophy and experimental science. The latter rose in the Renaissance from practical technique. Linnaeus, a classical scholar, combined the two on the threshold of the neo-classicist revival now called the Age of Enlightenment
.
The exploration of parts of the New World
by Europeans produced large numbers of new plants and animals that needed descriptions and classification. The old systems made it difficult to study and locate all these new specimens within a collection and often the same plants or animals were given different names simply because there were too many species to keep track of. A system was needed that could group these specimens together so they could be found; the binomial system was developed based on morphology
with groups having similar appearances. In the latter part of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th, careful study of animals commenced, which, directed first to familiar kinds, was gradually extended until it formed a sufficient body of knowledge to serve as an anatomical basis for classification. Advances in using this knowledge to classify living beings bear a debt to the research of medical anatomists, such as Fabricius
(1537–1619), Petrus Severinus (1580–1656), William Harvey
(1578–1657), and Edward Tyson
(1649–1708). Advances in classification due to the work of entomologists and the first microscopists is due to the research of people like Marcello Malpighi
(1628–1694), Jan Swammerdam
(1637–1680), and Robert Hooke
(1635–1702). Lord Monboddo (1714–1799) was one of the early abstract thinkers whose works illustrate knowledge of species relationships and who foreshadowed the theory of evolution
.
in his Bibliotheca Botanica to denote the authors who care about the principles of classification (in contrast to the mere collectors who are concerned primarily with the description of plants paying little or no attention to their arrangement into genera, etc.). Important early Methodists were Italian philosopher, physician, and botanist Andrea Caesalpino, English naturalist John Ray
, German physician and botanist Augustus Quirinus Rivinus
, and French physician, botanist, and traveller Joseph Pitton de Tournefort
.
Andrea Caesalpino (1519–1603) in his De plantis libri XVI (1583) proposed the first methodical arrangement of plants. On the basis of the structure of trunk
and fructification
he divided plants into fifteen "higher genera".
John Ray
(1627–1705) was an English naturalist who published important works on plants, animals, and natural theology. The approach he took to the classification of plants in his Historia Plantarum
was an important step towards modern taxonomy. Ray rejected the system of dichotomous division by which species were classified according to a pre-conceived, either/or type system, and instead classified plants according to similarities and differences that emerged from observation.
Both Caesalpino and Ray used traditional plant names and thus, the name of a plant did not reflect its taxonomic position (e.g. even though the apple
and the peach
belonged to different "higher genera" of John Ray's methodus, both retained their traditional names Malus and Malus Persica respectively). A further step was taken by Rivinus and Pitton de Tournefort who made genus
a distinct rank within taxonomic hierarchy and introduced the practice of naming the plants according to their genera.
Augustus Quirinus Rivinus
(1652–1723), in his classification of plants based on the characters of the flower
, introduced the category of order
(corresponding to the "higher" genera of John Ray and Andrea Caesalpino). He was the first to abolish the ancient division of plants into herb
s and tree
s and insisted that the true method of division should be based on the parts of the fructification
alone. Rivinus extensively used dichotomous keys to define both orders and genera. His method of naming plant species resembled that of Joseph Pitton de Tournefort. The names of all plants belonging to the same genus should begin with the same word (generic name). In the genera containing more than one species the first species was named with generic name only, while the second, etc. were named with a combination of the generic name and a modifier (differentia specifica).
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort
(1656–1708) introduced an even more sophisticated hierarchy of class, section, genus, and species. He was the first to use consistently the uniformly composed species names that consisted of a generic name and a many-worded diagnostic phrase differentia specifica. Unlike Rivinus, he used differentiae with all species of polytypic genera.
' great work, the Systema Naturæ (1st ed. 1735), ran through twelve editions during his lifetime. In this work, nature was divided into three kingdoms: mineral, vegetable and animal. Linnaeus used five ranks: class, order, genus, species, and variety.
He abandoned long descriptive names of classes and orders still used by his immediate predecessors (Rivinus and Pitton de Tournefort) and replaced them with single-word names, provided genera with detailed diagnoses (characteres naturales), and combined numerous varieties into their species, thus saving botany from the chaos of new forms produced by horticulturalists.
Linnaeus is best known for his introduction of the method still used to formulate the scientific name of every species. Before Linnaeus, long many-worded names (composed of a generic name and a differentia specifica) had been used, but as these names gave a description of the species, they were not fixed. In his Philosophia Botanica (1751) Linnaeus took every effort to improve the composition and reduce the length of the many-worded names by abolishing unnecessary rhetorics, introducing new descriptive terms and defining their meaning with an unprecedented precision. In the late 1740s Linnaeus began to use a parallel system of naming species with nomina trivialia. Nomen triviale, a trivial name, was a single- or two-word epithet placed on the margin of the page next to the many-worded "scientific" name. The only rules Linnaeus applied to them was that the trivial names should be short, unique within a given genus, and that they should not be changed. Linnaeus consistently applied nomina trivialia to the species of plants in Species Plantarum
(1st edn. 1753) and to the species of animals in the 10th edition
of Systema Naturæ (1758).
By consistently using these specific epithets, Linnaeus separated nomenclature from description. Even though the parallel use of nomina trivialia and many-worded descriptive names continued until late in the eighteenth century, it was gradually replaced by the practice of using shorter proper names consisting of the generic name and the trivial name of the species. In the nineteenth century, this new practice was codified in the first Rules and Laws of Nomenclature, and the 1st edn. of Species Plantarum and the 10th edn. of Systema Naturae were chosen as starting points for the Botanical and Zoological Nomenclature respectively. This convention for naming species is referred to as binomial nomenclature
.
Today, nomenclature is regulated by Nomenclature Codes
, which allows names divided into taxonomic rank
s.
as translating into a sort of dendrogram
of the Animal
- and Plant
Kingdoms
was formulated toward the end of the 18th century, well before the On the Origin of Species was published. Among early works exploring the idea of a transmutation of species
was Erasmus Darwin
's 1796 Zoönomia
and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
's Philosophie Zoologique of 1809. The idea was popularised in the Anglophone world by the speculative, but widely read Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
, published anonymously by Robert Chambers in 1844.
With Darwin's theory, a general acceptance that classification should reflect the Darwinian principle of common descent
quickly appeared. Tree of Life
representations became popular in scientific works, with known fossil groups incorporated. One of the first modern groups tied to fossil ancestors were birds. 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. 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 century, palaeontologists
worked to understand the history of animals through the ages by linking together known groups With the modern evolutionary synthesis
of the early 1940s, an essentially modern understanding of evolution of the major groups was in place. The evolutionary taxonomy being based on Linnaean taxonomic ranks, the two terms are largely interchangeable in modern use.
Since the 1960s a trend called cladistic taxonomy (or cladistics
or cladism) has emerged, arranging taxa in a hierarchical evolutionary tree, ignoring ranks. If a taxon
includes all the descendants of some ancestral form, it is called monophyletic. Groups that have descendant groups removed from them (e.g. dinosaurs, with birds as offspring group) are termed paraphyletic, while groups representing more than one branch from the tree of life are called polyphyletic. A formal code of nomenclature, the International Code of Phylogenetic Nomenclature
, or PhyloCode
for short, is currently under development, intended to deal with names of clade
s. Linnaean
ranks will be optional under the PhyloCode, which is intended to coexist with the current, rank-based codes.
. Linnaeus used this as the top rank, dividing the physical world into the plant, animal and mineral kingdoms. As advances in microscopy made classification of microorganisms possible, the number of kingdoms increased, five and six-kingdom systems being the most common.
Domains
are a relatively new grouping. The three-domain system
was first invented in 1990, but not generally accepted until later. One main characteristic of the three-domain method is the separation of Archaea
and Bacteria
, previously grouped into the single kingdom Bacteria (a kingdom also sometimes called Monera
). Consequently, the three domains of life are conceptualized as Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukaryota (comprising the nuclei-bearing eukaryotes). A small minority of scientists add Archaea as a sixth kingdom, but do not accept the domain method.
Thomas Cavalier-Smith
, who has published extensively on the classification of protists, has recently proposed that the Neomura
, the clade that groups together the Archaea
and Eukarya, would have evolved from Bacteria
, more precisely from Actinobacteria
. His classification of 2004 treats the archaebacteria as part of a subkingdom of the Kingdom Bacteria, i.e. he rejects the three-domain system entirely.
the scientific name Elephas maximus, so the name is sometimes written as "Elephas maximus Linnaeus, 1758". The names of authors are frequently abbreviated: the abbreviation "L." is universally accepted for Linnaeus, and in botany there is a regulated list of standard abbreviations (see list of botanists by author abbreviation). The system for assigning authorities differs slightly between botany
and zoology
. However, it is standard that if a species' name or placement has been changed since the original description, the original authority's name is placed in parentheses.
community to provide Globally Unique Identifiers in the form of Life Science Identifiers
(LSID) for all biological names. This would allow authors to cite names unambiguously in electronic media and reduce the significance of errors in the spelling of names or the abbreviation of authority names. Three large nomenclatural databases (referred to as nomenclators) have already begun this process, these are Index Fungorum
, International Plant Names Index
and ZooBank
. Other databases, that publish taxonomic rather than nomenclatural data, have also started using LSIDs to identify taxa. The key example of this is Catalogue of Life
. In the next step in integration, these taxonomic databases will include references to the nomenclatural databases using LSIDs.
Organism
In biology, an organism is any contiguous living system . In at least some form, all organisms are capable of response to stimuli, reproduction, growth and development, and maintenance of homoeostasis as a stable whole.An organism may either be unicellular or, as in the case of humans, comprise...
s by biological type
Biological type
In biology, a type is one particular specimen of an organism to which the scientific name of that organism is formally attached...
, such as genus
Genus
In biology, a genus is a low-level taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms, which is an example of definition by genus and differentia...
or species
Species
In biology, a species is one of the basic units of biological classification and a taxonomic rank. A species is often defined as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring. While in many cases this definition is adequate, more precise or differing measures are...
. Biological classification is part of scientific taxonomy
Taxonomy
Taxonomy is the science of identifying and naming species, and arranging them into a classification. The field of taxonomy, sometimes referred to as "biological taxonomy", revolves around the description and use of taxonomic units, known as taxa...
.
Modern biological classification has its root in the work of Carolus Linnaeus
Carolus Linnaeus
Carl Linnaeus , also known after his ennoblement as , was a Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist, who laid the foundations for the modern scheme of binomial nomenclature. He is known as the father of modern taxonomy, and is also considered one of the fathers of modern ecology...
, who grouped species according to shared physical characteristics. These groupings have since been revised to improve consistency with the Darwinian
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
principle of common descent
Common descent
In evolutionary biology, a group of organisms share common descent if they have a common ancestor. There is strong quantitative support for the theory that all living organisms on Earth are descended from a common ancestor....
. Molecular phylogenetics, which uses DNA sequences as data, has driven many recent revisions and is likely to continue to do so. Biological classification belongs to the science of biological systematics
Systematics
Biological systematics is the study of the diversification of terrestrial life, both past and present, and the relationships among living things through time. Relationships are visualized as evolutionary trees...
.
Definition
Classification has been defined by Mayr as "The arrangement of entities in a hierarchical series of nested classes, in which similar or related classes at one hierarchical level are combined comprehensively into more inclusive classes at the next higher level." A class is defined as "a collection of similar entities", where the similarity consists of the entities having attributes or traits in common.What makes biological classification different from other classification systems (e.g. classifying books in a library) is evolution: the similarity between organisms placed in the same taxon is not arbitrary, but is instead a result of shared descent from their nearest common ancestor. Accordingly, the important attributes or traits for biological classification are 'homologous
Homology (biology)
Homology forms the basis of organization for comparative biology. In 1843, Richard Owen defined homology as "the same organ in different animals under every variety of form and function". Organs as different as a bat's wing, a seal's flipper, a cat's paw and a human hand have a common underlying...
', i.e., inherited from common ancestors. These must be separated from traits that are analogous
Analogy (biology)
An analogy is a trait or an organ that appears similar in two unrelated organisms. The cladistic term for the same phenomenon is homoplasy, from Greek for same form. Biological anologies are often the result of convergent evolution....
. Thus birds and bats both have the power of flight, but this similarity is not used to classify them into a taxon (a "class"), because it is not inherited from a common ancestor. In spite of all the other differences between them, the fact that bats and whales both feed their young on milk is one of the features used to classify both of them as mammals, since it was inherited from a common ancestor(s).
Determining whether similarities are homologous or analogous can be difficult. Thus until recently, golden mole
Golden mole
Golden moles are small, insectivorous burrowing mammals native to southern Africa. They form the family Chrysochloridae, and are taxonomically distinct from the true moles which they resemble due to convergence...
s, found in South Africa, were placed in the same taxon (insectivore
Insectivore
An insectivore is a type of carnivore with a diet that consists chiefly of insects and similar small creatures. An alternate term is entomophage, which also refers to the human practice of eating insects....
s) as Northern Hemisphere
Northern Hemisphere
The Northern Hemisphere is the half of a planet that is north of its equator—the word hemisphere literally means “half sphere”. It is also that half of the celestial sphere north of the celestial equator...
moles
Mole (animal)
Moles are small cylindrical mammals adapted to a subterranean lifestyle. They have velvety fur; tiny or invisible ears and eyes; and short, powerful limbs with large paws oriented for digging. The term is especially and most properly used for the true moles, those of the Talpidae family in the...
, on the basis of morphological and behavioural similarities. However, molecular analysis has shown that they are not closely related, so that their similarities must be due to convergent evolution and not to shared descent, and so should not be used to place them in the same taxon.
Taxonomic ranks
A classification, as defined above, is necessarily hierarchical. In a biological classification, rank is the level (the relative position) in a hierarchy. (Rarely, the term "taxonomic category" is used instead of "rank".) There are seven main ranks defined by the international nomenclature codesNomenclature Codes
Nomenclature codes or codes of nomenclature are the various rulebooks that govern biological taxonomic nomenclature, each in their own broad field of organisms...
: kingdom, phylum/division, class, order, family, genus, species. "Domain", a level above kingdom, has become popular in recent years, but has not been accepted into the codes.
The most basic rank is that of species
Species
In biology, a species is one of the basic units of biological classification and a taxonomic rank. A species is often defined as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring. While in many cases this definition is adequate, more precise or differing measures are...
, the next higher is genus
Genus
In biology, a genus is a low-level taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms, which is an example of definition by genus and differentia...
, and then family
Family (biology)
In biological classification, family is* a taxonomic rank. Other well-known ranks are life, domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, genus, and species, with family fitting between order and genus. As for the other well-known ranks, there is the option of an immediately lower rank, indicated by the...
. Ranks are somewhat arbitrary, but hope to encapsulate the diversity contained within a group — a rough measure of the number of diversifications that the group has been through.
The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature
International Code of Zoological Nomenclature
The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature is a widely accepted convention in zoology that rules the formal scientific naming of organisms treated as animals...
defines rank, in the nomenclatural sense, as:
The level, for nomenclatural purposes, of a taxon in a taxonomic hierarchy (e.g. all families are for nomenclatural purposes at the same rank, which lies between superfamily and subfamily). The ranks of the family group, the genus group, and the speciesSpeciesIn biology, a species is one of the basic units of biological classification and a taxonomic rank. A species is often defined as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring. While in many cases this definition is adequate, more precise or differing measures are...
group at which nominal taxa may be established are stated in Articles 10.3, 10.4, 35.1, 42.1 and 45.1.
There are slightly different ranks for zoology and for botany, including subdivisions such as tribe
Tribe (biology)
In biology, a tribe is a taxonomic rank between family and genus. It is sometimes subdivided into subtribes.Some examples include the tribes: Canini, Acalypheae, Hominini, Bombini, and Antidesmeae.-See also:* Biological classification* Rank...
.
Ancient through medieval times
Current systems of classifying forms of lifeLife
Life is a characteristic that distinguishes objects that have signaling and self-sustaining processes from those that do not, either because such functions have ceased , or else because they lack such functions and are classified as inanimate...
descend from the thought presented by the Greek philosopher Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
, who published in his metaphysical
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
works the first known classification of everything whatsoever, or "being". This is the scheme that gave such words as 'substance', 'species' and 'genus' and was retained in modified and less general form by Linnaeus.
Aristotle also studied animals and classified them according to method of reproduction, as did Linnaeus later with plants. Aristotle's animal classification was eventually made obsolete by additional knowledge and forgotten.
The philosophical classification is in brief as follows: Primary substance is the individual being; for example, Peter, Paul, etc. Secondary substance is a predicate that can properly or characteristically be said of a class of primary substances; for example, man of Peter, Paul, etc. The characteristic must not be merely in the individual; for example, being skilled in grammar. Grammatical skill leaves most of Peter out and therefore is not characteristic of him. Similarly man (all of mankind) is not in Peter; rather, he is in man.
Species is the secondary substance that is most proper to its individuals. The most characteristic thing that can be said of Peter is that Peter is a man. An identity is being postulated: "man" is equal to all its individuals and only those individuals. Members of a species differ only in number but are totally the same type.
Genus is a secondary substance less characteristic of and more general than the species; for example, man is an animal, but not all animals are men. It is clear that a genus contains species. There is no limit to the number of Aristotelian genera that might be found to contain the species. Aristotle does not structure the genera into phylum
Phylum
In biology, a phylum The term was coined by Georges Cuvier from Greek φῦλον phylon, "race, stock," related to φυλή phyle, "tribe, clan." is a taxonomic rank below kingdom and above class. "Phylum" is equivalent to the botanical term division....
, class, etc., as the Linnaean classification does.
The secondary substance that distinguishes one species from another within a genus is the specific difference. Man can thus be comprehended as the sum of specific differences (the "differentiae" of biology) in less and less general categories. This sum is the definition; for example, man is an animate, sensate, rational substance. The most characteristic definition contains the species and the next most general genus: man is a rational animal. Definition is thus based on the unity problem: the species is but one yet has many differentiae.
The very top genera are the categories
Categories (Aristotle)
The Categories is a text from Aristotle's Organon that enumerates all the possible kinds of thing that can be the subject or the predicate of a proposition...
. There are ten: one of substance and nine of "accidents", universals that must be "in" a substance. Substances exist by themselves; accidents are only in them: quantity, quality, etc. There is no higher category, "being", because of the following problem, which was only solved in the Middle Ages
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
by Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas, O.P. , also Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, was an Italian Dominican priest of the Catholic Church, and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism, known as Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis, or Doctor Universalis...
: a specific difference is not characteristic of its genus. If man is a rational animal, then rationality is not a property of animals. Substance therefore cannot be a kind of being because it can have no specific difference, which would have to be non-being.
The problem of "being" occupied the attention of scholastics during the time of the Middle Ages. The solution of St. Thomas, termed the analogy of being, established the field of ontology
Ontology
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...
, which received the better part of the publicity and also drew the line between philosophy and experimental science. The latter rose in the Renaissance from practical technique. Linnaeus, a classical scholar, combined the two on the threshold of the neo-classicist revival now called the Age of Enlightenment
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...
.
Renaissance through Age of Reason
An important advance was made by the Swiss professor, Conrad von Gesner (1516–1565). Gesner's work was a critical compilation of life known at the time.The exploration of parts of the New World
New World
The New World is one of the names used for the Western Hemisphere, specifically America and sometimes Oceania . The term originated in the late 15th century, when America had been recently discovered by European explorers, expanding the geographical horizon of the people of the European middle...
by Europeans produced large numbers of new plants and animals that needed descriptions and classification. The old systems made it difficult to study and locate all these new specimens within a collection and often the same plants or animals were given different names simply because there were too many species to keep track of. A system was needed that could group these specimens together so they could be found; the binomial system was developed based on morphology
Morphology (biology)
In biology, morphology is a branch of bioscience dealing with the study of the form and structure of organisms and their specific structural features....
with groups having similar appearances. In the latter part of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th, careful study of animals commenced, which, directed first to familiar kinds, was gradually extended until it formed a sufficient body of knowledge to serve as an anatomical basis for classification. Advances in using this knowledge to classify living beings bear a debt to the research of medical anatomists, such as Fabricius
Hieronymus Fabricius
Hieronymus Fabricius or Girolamo Fabrizio or by his Latin name Fabricus ab Aquapendende also Girolamo Fabrizi d'Acquapendente was a pioneering anatomist and surgeon known in medical science as "The Father of Embryology."...
(1537–1619), Petrus Severinus (1580–1656), William Harvey
William Harvey
William Harvey was an English physician who was the first person to describe completely and in detail the systemic circulation and properties of blood being pumped to the body by the heart...
(1578–1657), and Edward Tyson
Edward Tyson
Edward Tyson was a British scientist and physician, commonly regarded as the founder of modern comparative anatomy, which compares the anatomy between species....
(1649–1708). Advances in classification due to the work of entomologists and the first microscopists is due to the research of people like Marcello Malpighi
Marcello Malpighi
Marcello Malpighi was an Italian doctor, who gave his name to several physiological features, like the Malpighian tubule system.-Early years:...
(1628–1694), Jan Swammerdam
Jan Swammerdam
Jan Swammerdam was a Dutch biologist and microscopist. His work on insects demonstrated that the various phases during the life of an insect—egg, larva, pupa, and adult—are different forms of the same animal. As part of his anatomical research, he carried out experiments on muscle contraction...
(1637–1680), and Robert Hooke
Robert Hooke
Robert Hooke FRS was an English natural philosopher, architect and polymath.His adult life comprised three distinct periods: as a scientific inquirer lacking money; achieving great wealth and standing through his reputation for hard work and scrupulous honesty following the great fire of 1666, but...
(1635–1702). Lord Monboddo (1714–1799) was one of the early abstract thinkers whose works illustrate knowledge of species relationships and who foreshadowed the theory of evolution
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
.
Early methodists
Since late in the 15th century, a number of authors had become concerned with what they called methodus, (method). By method authors mean an arrangement of minerals, plants, and animals according to the principles of logical division. The term Methodists was coined by Carolus LinnaeusCarolus Linnaeus
Carl Linnaeus , also known after his ennoblement as , was a Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist, who laid the foundations for the modern scheme of binomial nomenclature. He is known as the father of modern taxonomy, and is also considered one of the fathers of modern ecology...
in his Bibliotheca Botanica to denote the authors who care about the principles of classification (in contrast to the mere collectors who are concerned primarily with the description of plants paying little or no attention to their arrangement into genera, etc.). Important early Methodists were Italian philosopher, physician, and botanist Andrea Caesalpino, English naturalist John Ray
John Ray
John Ray was an English naturalist, sometimes referred to as the father of English natural history. Until 1670, he wrote his name as John Wray. From then on, he used 'Ray', after "having ascertained that such had been the practice of his family before him".He published important works on botany,...
, German physician and botanist Augustus Quirinus Rivinus
Augustus Quirinus Rivinus
Augustus Quirinus Rivinus , also known as August Bachmann, was a German physician and botanist.He was born in Leipzig, Germany, and studied at the University of Leipzig , continued his studies in the University of Helmstedt...
, and French physician, botanist, and traveller Joseph Pitton de Tournefort
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort was a French botanist, notable as the first to make a clear definition of the concept of genus for plants.- Biography :...
.
Andrea Caesalpino (1519–1603) in his De plantis libri XVI (1583) proposed the first methodical arrangement of plants. On the basis of the structure of trunk
Trunk (botany)
In botany, trunk refers to the main wooden axis of a tree that supports the branches and is supported by and directly attached to the roots. The trunk is covered by the bark, which is an important diagnostic feature in tree identification, and which often differs markedly from the bottom of the...
and fructification
Fructification
Fructification is a term used in the plant morphology to denote the generative parts of the plant...
he divided plants into fifteen "higher genera".
John Ray
John Ray
John Ray was an English naturalist, sometimes referred to as the father of English natural history. Until 1670, he wrote his name as John Wray. From then on, he used 'Ray', after "having ascertained that such had been the practice of his family before him".He published important works on botany,...
(1627–1705) was an English naturalist who published important works on plants, animals, and natural theology. The approach he took to the classification of plants in his Historia Plantarum
Historia Plantarum
Historia Plantarum is Latin and literally means History of Plants, although in reality it means something closer to "on plants" or "treatise on plants". There has been more than one book by this title....
was an important step towards modern taxonomy. Ray rejected the system of dichotomous division by which species were classified according to a pre-conceived, either/or type system, and instead classified plants according to similarities and differences that emerged from observation.
Both Caesalpino and Ray used traditional plant names and thus, the name of a plant did not reflect its taxonomic position (e.g. even though the apple
Apple
The apple is the pomaceous fruit of the apple tree, species Malus domestica in the rose family . It is one of the most widely cultivated tree fruits, and the most widely known of the many members of genus Malus that are used by humans. Apple grow on small, deciduous trees that blossom in the spring...
and the peach
Peach
The peach tree is a deciduous tree growing to tall and 6 in. in diameter, belonging to the subfamily Prunoideae of the family Rosaceae. It bears an edible juicy fruit called a peach...
belonged to different "higher genera" of John Ray's methodus, both retained their traditional names Malus and Malus Persica respectively). A further step was taken by Rivinus and Pitton de Tournefort who made genus
Genus
In biology, a genus is a low-level taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms, which is an example of definition by genus and differentia...
a distinct rank within taxonomic hierarchy and introduced the practice of naming the plants according to their genera.
Augustus Quirinus Rivinus
Augustus Quirinus Rivinus
Augustus Quirinus Rivinus , also known as August Bachmann, was a German physician and botanist.He was born in Leipzig, Germany, and studied at the University of Leipzig , continued his studies in the University of Helmstedt...
(1652–1723), in his classification of plants based on the characters of the flower
Flower
A flower, sometimes known as a bloom or blossom, is the reproductive structure found in flowering plants . The biological function of a flower is to effect reproduction, usually by providing a mechanism for the union of sperm with eggs...
, introduced the category of order
Order (biology)
In scientific classification used in biology, the order is# a taxonomic rank used in the classification of organisms. Other well-known ranks are life, domain, kingdom, phylum, class, family, genus, and species, with order fitting in between class and family...
(corresponding to the "higher" genera of John Ray and Andrea Caesalpino). He was the first to abolish the ancient division of plants into herb
Herb
Except in botanical usage, an herb is "any plant with leaves, seeds, or flowers used for flavoring, food, medicine, or perfume" or "a part of such a plant as used in cooking"...
s and tree
Tree
A tree is a perennial woody plant. It is most often defined as a woody plant that has many secondary branches supported clear of the ground on a single main stem or trunk with clear apical dominance. A minimum height specification at maturity is cited by some authors, varying from 3 m to...
s and insisted that the true method of division should be based on the parts of the fructification
Fructification
Fructification is a term used in the plant morphology to denote the generative parts of the plant...
alone. Rivinus extensively used dichotomous keys to define both orders and genera. His method of naming plant species resembled that of Joseph Pitton de Tournefort. The names of all plants belonging to the same genus should begin with the same word (generic name). In the genera containing more than one species the first species was named with generic name only, while the second, etc. were named with a combination of the generic name and a modifier (differentia specifica).
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort was a French botanist, notable as the first to make a clear definition of the concept of genus for plants.- Biography :...
(1656–1708) introduced an even more sophisticated hierarchy of class, section, genus, and species. He was the first to use consistently the uniformly composed species names that consisted of a generic name and a many-worded diagnostic phrase differentia specifica. Unlike Rivinus, he used differentiae with all species of polytypic genera.
Linnaean taxonomy
Carolus LinnaeusCarolus Linnaeus
Carl Linnaeus , also known after his ennoblement as , was a Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist, who laid the foundations for the modern scheme of binomial nomenclature. He is known as the father of modern taxonomy, and is also considered one of the fathers of modern ecology...
' great work, the Systema Naturæ (1st ed. 1735), ran through twelve editions during his lifetime. In this work, nature was divided into three kingdoms: mineral, vegetable and animal. Linnaeus used five ranks: class, order, genus, species, and variety.
He abandoned long descriptive names of classes and orders still used by his immediate predecessors (Rivinus and Pitton de Tournefort) and replaced them with single-word names, provided genera with detailed diagnoses (characteres naturales), and combined numerous varieties into their species, thus saving botany from the chaos of new forms produced by horticulturalists.
Linnaeus is best known for his introduction of the method still used to formulate the scientific name of every species. Before Linnaeus, long many-worded names (composed of a generic name and a differentia specifica) had been used, but as these names gave a description of the species, they were not fixed. In his Philosophia Botanica (1751) Linnaeus took every effort to improve the composition and reduce the length of the many-worded names by abolishing unnecessary rhetorics, introducing new descriptive terms and defining their meaning with an unprecedented precision. In the late 1740s Linnaeus began to use a parallel system of naming species with nomina trivialia. Nomen triviale, a trivial name, was a single- or two-word epithet placed on the margin of the page next to the many-worded "scientific" name. The only rules Linnaeus applied to them was that the trivial names should be short, unique within a given genus, and that they should not be changed. Linnaeus consistently applied nomina trivialia to the species of plants in Species Plantarum
Species Plantarum
Species Plantarum was first published in 1753, as a two-volume work by Carl Linnaeus. Its prime importance is perhaps that it is the primary starting point of plant nomenclature as it exists today. This means that the first names to be considered validly published in botany are those that appear...
(1st edn. 1753) and to the species of animals in the 10th edition
10th edition of Systema Naturae
The 10th edition of Systema Naturae was a book written by Carl Linnaeus and published in two volumes in 1758 and 1759, which marks the starting point of zoological nomenclature...
of Systema Naturæ (1758).
By consistently using these specific epithets, Linnaeus separated nomenclature from description. Even though the parallel use of nomina trivialia and many-worded descriptive names continued until late in the eighteenth century, it was gradually replaced by the practice of using shorter proper names consisting of the generic name and the trivial name of the species. In the nineteenth century, this new practice was codified in the first Rules and Laws of Nomenclature, and the 1st edn. of Species Plantarum and the 10th edn. of Systema Naturae were chosen as starting points for the Botanical and Zoological Nomenclature respectively. This convention for naming species is referred to as binomial nomenclature
Binomial nomenclature
Binomial nomenclature is a formal system of naming species of living things by giving each a name composed of two parts, both of which use Latin grammatical forms, although they can be based on words from other languages...
.
Today, nomenclature is regulated by Nomenclature Codes
Nomenclature Codes
Nomenclature codes or codes of nomenclature are the various rulebooks that govern biological taxonomic nomenclature, each in their own broad field of organisms...
, which allows names divided into taxonomic rank
Taxonomic rank
In biological classification, rank is the level in a taxonomic hierarchy. Examples of taxonomic ranks are species, genus, family, and class. Each rank subsumes under it a number of less general categories...
s.
Modern system
Whereas Linnaeus classified for ease of identification, the idea of the Linnaean taxonomyLinnaean taxonomy
Linnaean taxonomy can mean either of two related concepts:# the particular form of biological classification set up by Carl Linnaeus, as set forth in his Systema Naturæ and subsequent works...
as translating into a sort of dendrogram
Dendrogram
A dendrogram is a tree diagram frequently used to illustrate the arrangement of the clusters produced by hierarchical clustering...
of the Animal
Animal
Animals are a major group of multicellular, eukaryotic organisms of the kingdom Animalia or Metazoa. Their body plan eventually becomes fixed as they develop, although some undergo a process of metamorphosis later on in their life. Most animals are motile, meaning they can move spontaneously and...
- and Plant
Plant
Plants are living organisms belonging to the kingdom Plantae. Precise definitions of the kingdom vary, but as the term is used here, plants include familiar organisms such as trees, flowers, herbs, bushes, grasses, vines, ferns, mosses, and green algae. The group is also called green plants or...
Kingdoms
Kingdom (biology)
In biology, kingdom is a taxonomic rank, which is either the highest rank or in the more recent three-domain system, the rank below domain. Kingdoms are divided into smaller groups called phyla or divisions in botany...
was formulated toward the end of the 18th century, well before the On the Origin of Species was published. Among early works exploring the idea of a transmutation of species
Transmutation of species
Transmutation of species was a term used by Jean Baptiste Lamarck in 1809 for his theory that described the altering of one species into another, and the term is often used to describe 19th century evolutionary ideas that preceded Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection...
was Erasmus Darwin
Erasmus Darwin
Erasmus Darwin was an English physician who turned down George III's invitation to be a physician to the King. One of the key thinkers of the Midlands Enlightenment, he was also a natural philosopher, physiologist, slave trade abolitionist,inventor and poet...
's 1796 Zoönomia
Zoönomia
Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life is a two-volume medical work by Erasmus Darwin dealing with pathology, anatomy, psychology, and the functioning of the body...
and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de la Marck , often known simply as Lamarck, was a French naturalist...
's Philosophie Zoologique of 1809. The idea was popularised in the Anglophone world by the speculative, but widely read Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation is a unique work of speculative natural history published anonymously in England in 1844. It brought together various ideas of stellar evolution with the progressive transmutation of species in an accessible narrative which tied together numerous...
, published anonymously by Robert Chambers in 1844.
With Darwin's theory, a general acceptance that classification should reflect the Darwinian principle of common descent
Common descent
In evolutionary biology, a group of organisms share common descent if they have a common ancestor. There is strong quantitative support for the theory that all living organisms on Earth are descended from a common ancestor....
quickly appeared. Tree of Life
Tree of life (science)
Charles Darwin proposed that phylogeny, the evolutionary relatedness among species through time, was expressible as a metaphor he termed the Tree of Life...
representations became popular in scientific works, with known fossil groups incorporated. One of the first modern groups tied to fossil ancestors were birds. Using the then newly discovered fossils of Archaeopteryx
Archaeopteryx
Archaeopteryx , sometimes referred to by its German name Urvogel , is a genus of theropod dinosaur that is closely related to birds. The name derives from the Ancient Greek meaning "ancient", and , meaning "feather" or "wing"...
and Hesperornis
Hesperornis
Hesperornis is a genus of flightless aquatic birds that spanned the first half of the Campanian age of the Late Cretaceous period . One of the lesser-known discoveries of the paleontologist O. C. Marsh in the late 19th century Bone Wars, it was an important early find in the history of avian...
, Thomas Henry Huxley pronounced that they had evolved from dinosaurs, a group formally named by Richard Owen
Richard Owen
Sir Richard Owen, FRS KCB was an English biologist, comparative anatomist and palaeontologist.Owen is probably best remembered today for coining the word Dinosauria and for his outspoken opposition to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection...
in 1842. The resulting description, that of dinosaurs "giving rise to" or being "the ancestors of" birds, is the essential hallmark of evolutionary taxonomic
Evolutionary taxonomy
Evolutionary taxonomy, evolutionary systematics or Darwinian classification is a branch of biological classification that seeks to classify organisms using a combination of phylogenetic relationship and overall similarity. This type of taxonomy considers taxa rather than single species, so that...
thinking. As more and more fossil groups were found and recognized in the late 19th and early 20th century, palaeontologists
Paleontology
Paleontology "old, ancient", ὄν, ὀντ- "being, creature", and λόγος "speech, thought") is the study of prehistoric life. It includes the study of fossils to determine organisms' evolution and interactions with each other and their environments...
worked to understand the history of animals through the ages by linking together known groups With the modern evolutionary synthesis
Modern evolutionary synthesis
The modern evolutionary synthesis is a union of ideas from several biological specialties which provides a widely accepted account of evolution...
of the early 1940s, an essentially modern understanding of evolution of the major groups was in place. The evolutionary taxonomy being based on Linnaean taxonomic ranks, the two terms are largely interchangeable in modern use.
Since the 1960s a trend called cladistic taxonomy (or cladistics
Cladistics
Cladistics is a method of classifying species of organisms into groups called clades, which consist of an ancestor organism and all its descendants . For example, birds, dinosaurs, crocodiles, and all descendants of their most recent common ancestor form a clade...
or cladism) has emerged, arranging taxa in a hierarchical evolutionary tree, ignoring ranks. If a taxon
Taxon
|thumb|270px|[[African elephants]] form a widely-accepted taxon, the [[genus]] LoxodontaA taxon is a group of organisms, which a taxonomist adjudges to be a unit. Usually a taxon is given a name and a rank, although neither is a requirement...
includes all the descendants of some ancestral form, it is called monophyletic. Groups that have descendant groups removed from them (e.g. dinosaurs, with birds as offspring group) are termed paraphyletic, while groups representing more than one branch from the tree of life are called polyphyletic. A formal code of nomenclature, the International Code of Phylogenetic Nomenclature
Phylogenetic nomenclature
Phylogenetic nomenclature or phylogenetic taxonomy is an alternative to rank-based nomenclature, applying definitions from cladistics . Its two defining features are the use of phylogenetic definitions of biological taxon names, and the lack of obligatory ranks...
, or PhyloCode
PhyloCode
The International Code of Phylogenetic Nomenclature, known as the PhyloCode for short, is a developing draft for a formal set of rules governing phylogenetic nomenclature...
for short, is currently under development, intended to deal with names of clade
Clade
A clade is a group consisting of a species and all its descendants. In the terms of biological systematics, a clade is a single "branch" on the "tree of life". The idea that such a "natural group" of organisms should be grouped together and given a taxonomic name is central to biological...
s. Linnaean
Linnaean taxonomy
Linnaean taxonomy can mean either of two related concepts:# the particular form of biological classification set up by Carl Linnaeus, as set forth in his Systema Naturæ and subsequent works...
ranks will be optional under the PhyloCode, which is intended to coexist with the current, rank-based codes.
Kingdoms and domains
From well before Linnaeus, plants and animals were considered separate KingdomsKingdom (biology)
In biology, kingdom is a taxonomic rank, which is either the highest rank or in the more recent three-domain system, the rank below domain. Kingdoms are divided into smaller groups called phyla or divisions in botany...
. Linnaeus used this as the top rank, dividing the physical world into the plant, animal and mineral kingdoms. As advances in microscopy made classification of microorganisms possible, the number of kingdoms increased, five and six-kingdom systems being the most common.
Domains
Domain (biology)
In biological taxonomy, a domain is the highest taxonomic rank of organisms, higher than a kingdom. According to the three-domain system of Carl Woese, introduced in 1990, the Tree of Life consists of three domains: Archaea, Bacteria and Eukarya...
are a relatively new grouping. The three-domain system
Three-domain system
The three-domain system is a biological classification introduced by Carl Woese in 1977 that divides cellular life forms into archaea, bacteria, and eukaryote domains. In particular, it emphasizes the separation of prokaryotes into two groups, originally called Eubacteria and Archaebacteria...
was first invented in 1990, but not generally accepted until later. One main characteristic of the three-domain method is the separation of Archaea
Archaea
The Archaea are a group of single-celled microorganisms. A single individual or species from this domain is called an archaeon...
and Bacteria
Bacteria
Bacteria are a large domain of prokaryotic microorganisms. Typically a few micrometres in length, bacteria have a wide range of shapes, ranging from spheres to rods and spirals...
, previously grouped into the single kingdom Bacteria (a kingdom also sometimes called Monera
Monera
Monera is a superseded kingdom that contains unicellular organisms without a nucleus , such as bacteria....
). Consequently, the three domains of life are conceptualized as Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukaryota (comprising the nuclei-bearing eukaryotes). A small minority of scientists add Archaea as a sixth kingdom, but do not accept the domain method.
Thomas Cavalier-Smith
Thomas Cavalier-Smith
Professor Thomas Cavalier-Smith , FRS, FRSC, NERC Professorial Fellow, is a Professor of Evolutionary Biology in the Department of Zoology, at the University of Oxford...
, who has published extensively on the classification of protists, has recently proposed that the Neomura
Neomura
Neomura is a clade composed of the two domains of life of Archaea and Eukaryota. The group was first proposed by Thomas Cavalier-Smith and its name means "new walls"; so called because it is thought to have evolved from Bacteria, and one of the major changes was the replacement of peptidoglycan...
, the clade that groups together the Archaea
Archaea
The Archaea are a group of single-celled microorganisms. A single individual or species from this domain is called an archaeon...
and Eukarya, would have evolved from Bacteria
Bacteria
Bacteria are a large domain of prokaryotic microorganisms. Typically a few micrometres in length, bacteria have a wide range of shapes, ranging from spheres to rods and spirals...
, more precisely from Actinobacteria
Actinobacteria
Actinobacteria are a group of Gram-positive bacteria with high guanine and cytosine content. They can be terrestrial or aquatic. Actinobacteria is one of the dominant phyla of the bacteria....
. His classification of 2004 treats the archaebacteria as part of a subkingdom of the Kingdom Bacteria, i.e. he rejects the three-domain system entirely.
Authorities (author citation)
An "authority" may be placed after a scientific name. The authority is the name of the scientist who first validly published the name. For example, in 1758 Linnaeus gave the Asian elephantAsian Elephant
The Asian or Asiatic elephant is the only living species of the genus Elephas and distributed in Southeast Asia from India in the west to Borneo in the east. Three subspecies are recognized — Elephas maximus maximus from Sri Lanka, the Indian elephant or E. m. indicus from mainland Asia, and E. m....
the scientific name Elephas maximus, so the name is sometimes written as "Elephas maximus Linnaeus, 1758". The names of authors are frequently abbreviated: the abbreviation "L." is universally accepted for Linnaeus, and in botany there is a regulated list of standard abbreviations (see list of botanists by author abbreviation). The system for assigning authorities differs slightly between botany
Author citation (botany)
In botanical nomenclature, author citation refers to citing the person who validly published a botanical name, i.e. who first published the name while fulfilling the formal requirements as specified by the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature...
and zoology
Author citation (zoology)
In zoological nomenclature, author citation refers to listing the person who first makes a scientific name of a taxon available. This is done in a scientific publication while fulfilling the formal requirements under the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, hereinafter termed "the Code"...
. However, it is standard that if a species' name or placement has been changed since the original description, the original authority's name is placed in parentheses.
Globally Unique Identifiers for names
There is a movement within the biodiversity informaticsBiodiversity Informatics
Biodiversity Informatics is the application of informatics techniques to biodiversity information for improved management, presentation, discovery, exploration and analysis...
community to provide Globally Unique Identifiers in the form of Life Science Identifiers
LSID
Life Science Identifiers are a way to name and locate pieces of information on the web. Essentially, an LSID is a unique identifier for some data, and the LSID protocol specifies a standard way to locate the data...
(LSID) for all biological names. This would allow authors to cite names unambiguously in electronic media and reduce the significance of errors in the spelling of names or the abbreviation of authority names. Three large nomenclatural databases (referred to as nomenclators) have already begun this process, these are Index Fungorum
Index Fungorum
Index Fungorum, an international project to index all formal names in the Fungi Kingdom. Somewhat comparable to the IPNI, but with more contributing institutions....
, International Plant Names Index
IPNI
The International Plant Names Index is a database of botanical names. It indexes names of seed plants, ferns and "fern allies". Coverage is best at the rank of species and genus...
and ZooBank
ZooBank
ZooBank is an open access website intended to be the official International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature registry of zoological nomenclature. It was officially proposed in 2005 by the executive secretary of ICZN...
. Other databases, that publish taxonomic rather than nomenclatural data, have also started using LSIDs to identify taxa. The key example of this is Catalogue of Life
Catalogue of Life
The Catalogue of Life, started in June 2001 by Species 2000 and Integrated Taxonomic Information System , is planned to become a comprehensive catalogue of all known species of organisms on Earth by the year 2011. 66 taxonomic databases with contributions from more than 3,000 specialists from...
. In the next step in integration, these taxonomic databases will include references to the nomenclatural databases using LSIDs.
See also
- All Species FoundationAll Species FoundationThe All Species Foundation aimed to catalog all species on Earth by 2025. It began in 2001 as a spinoff of the Long Now Foundation.The Foundation started with a large grant from the Schlinger Foundation but because of the stock market crash of 2000, at least in part, it was unable to attract...
- HolotypeHolotypeA holotype is a single physical example of an organism, known to have been used when the species was formally described. It is either the single such physical example or one of several such, but explicitly designated as the holotype...
- International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plantsInternational Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plantsThe International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants is the set of rules and recommendations dealing with the formal botanical names that are given to plants, fungi and a few other groups of organisms, all those "traditionally treated as plants"., Preamble, para...
- International Code of Zoological NomenclatureInternational Code of Zoological NomenclatureThe International Code of Zoological Nomenclature is a widely accepted convention in zoology that rules the formal scientific naming of organisms treated as animals...
- List of Latin and Greek words commonly used in systematic names
- PheneticsPheneticsIn biology, phenetics, also known as taximetrics, is an attempt to classify organisms based on overall similarity, usually in morphology or other observable traits, regardless of their phylogeny or evolutionary relation. It is closely related to numerical taxonomy which is concerned with the use of...
- Phylogenetic treePhylogenetic treeA phylogenetic tree or evolutionary tree is a branching diagram or "tree" showing the inferred evolutionary relationships among various biological species or other entities based upon similarities and differences in their physical and/or genetic characteristics...
- Species descriptionSpecies descriptionA species description or type description is a formal description of a newly discovered species, usually in the form of a scientific paper. Its purpose is to give a clear description of a new species of organism and explain how it differs from species which have been described previously, or are...
- Tree of Life Web ProjectTree of Life Web ProjectThe Tree of Life Web Project is an ongoing Internet project providing information about the diversity and phylogeny of life on Earth. This collaborative peer reviewed project began in 1995, and is written by biologists from around the world....
- Trinomial nomenclatureTrinomial nomenclatureIn biology, trinomial nomenclature refers to names for taxa below the rank of species. This is different for animals and plants:* for animals see trinomen. There is only one rank allowed below the rank of species: subspecies....
- Type (biology)
- Virus classificationVirus classificationVirus classification is the process of naming viruses and placing them into a taxonomic system. Similar to the classification systems used for cellular organisms, virus classification is the subject of ongoing debate and proposals. This is mainly due to the pseudo-living nature of viruses, which...