TAXONOMY

CONCEPT

Taxonomy is the area of the biological sciences devoted to the identification, naming, and classification of
living things according to apparent common characteristics. It is far from a simple subject, particularly
owing to many disputes over the rules for classifying plants and animals. In terms of real-life application,
taxonomy, on the one hand, is related to the entire world of life on Earth, but on the other hand, it might
seem an ivory-tower discipline that it has nothing to do with the lives of ordinary people. Nonetheless, to
understand the very science of life, which is biology, it is essential to understand taxonomy. Each discipline
has its own form of taxonomy: people cannot really grasp politics, for instance, without knowing such
basics of political classification as the difference between a dictatorship and a democracy or a
representative government and one with an absolute ruler. In the biological sciences, before one can begin
to appreciate the many varieties of organisms on Earth, it is essential to comprehend the fundamental ideas
about how those organisms are related—or, in areas of dispute, may be related—to one another.

Biological systematics is the study of the diversification of life on the planet Earth, both past and present,
and the relationships among living things through time. Relationships are visualized as evolutionary trees
(synonyms: cladograms, phylogenetic trees, phylogenies). Phylogenies have two components, branching
order (showing group relationships) and branch length (showing amount of evolution). Phylogenetic trees
of species and higher taxa are used to study the evolution of traits (e.g., anatomical or molecular
characteristics) and the distribution of organisms (biogeography). Systematics, in other words, is used to
understand the evolutionary history of life on Earth.
"Systematic biology" and "taxonomy" (terms that are often confused and used interchangeably) were
defined in relationship to one another as follows:[1]
Systematic biology (hereafter called simply systematics) is the field that (a) provides scientific names for
organisms, (b) describes them, (c) preserves collections of them, (d) provides classifications for the
organisms, keys for their identification, and data on their distributions, (e) investigates their evolutionary
histories, and (f) considers their environmental adaptations. This is a field with a long history that in recent
years has experienced a notable renaissance, principally with respect to theoretical content. Part of the
theoretical material has to do with evolutionary areas (topics e and f above), the rest relates especially to the
problem of classification. Taxonomy is that part of systematics concerned with topics (a) to (d) above.
The term "systematics" is sometimes used synonymously with "taxonomy" and may be confused with
"scientific classification." However, taxonomy is more specifically the identification, description and
naming (i.e. nomenclature) of organisms, while "classification" is focused on placing organisms within
hierarchical groups that show their relationships to other organisms. All of these biological disciplines can
be involved with extinct and extant organisms. However, systematics alone deals specifically with
relationships through time, and can be synonymous with phylogenetics, broadly dealing with the inferred
hierarchy of organisms. Systematics uses taxonomy as a primary tool in understanding organisms, as
nothing about an organism's relationships with other living things can be understood without it first being
properly studied and described in sufficient detail to identify and classify it correctly. Scientific
classifications are aids in recording and reporting information to other scientists and to laymen.
The systematist, a scientist who specializes in systematics, must, therefore, be able to use existing
classification systems, or at least know them well enough to skillfully justify not using them.
Phenetic systematics was an attempt to determine the relationships of organisms through a measure of
similarity, consideringplesiomorphies (ancestral traits) and apomorphies (derived traits) to be equally
informative. From the 20th century onwards, it was superseded by cladistics, which considers
plesiomorphies to be uninformative for an attempt to resolve the phylogeny of Earth's various organisms
through time. Today's systematists generally make extensive use of molecular biology and computer
programs to study organisms. Systematics is fundamental to biology because it is the foundation for all
studies of organisms, by showing how any organism relates to other living things (ancestor-descendant
relationships). Systematics is also of major importance in understanding conservation issues because it
attempts to explain the Earth's biodiversity and could be used to assist in allocating limited means to
preserve and protect endangered species, by looking at, for example, the genetic diversity among various
taxa of plants or animals and deciding how much of that to preserve.