12 chapter one

shared history as its basis for identifying taxa. But that is not because
phenotypes are unimportant.
The search for natural classification systems in biology has turned
out to be difficult, because biological individuals are marked by both
their history and their environment. It has proved to be difficult (ar-
guably impossible) to incorporate both influences on causal profiles
within the one system of classification. If there were a single natural
taxonomy for biology, the biodiversity problem would be more trac-
table. We could unequivocally identify the natural elements from which
biological systems are composed, and their important similarities and
differences. Defining diversity would still not be easy; some systems
would be diverse because of the number of distinct elements in them
and others because of the differences between those elements, and so
we would have to weight differentiation against number. But as we shall
see, the quest for natural taxonomies in biology has been difficult, and
that exacerbates the problem of defining diversity.

Evolutionary Taxonomy’s Uneasy Compromise

By the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, in 1859, the Lin-

naean system was already in wide use in biology. The basic Linnaean
move was to introduce the binomial system, with species being grouped
into genera, each of which consists of a cluster of similar species. But
it was elaborated into a deeper hierarchical system: a cluster of similar
genera is a family; a cluster of families is an order, and so on up the taxo-
nomic hierarchy. This system was one of several nineteenth-century
systems of taxonomy based upon elaborate patterns that, given a cer-
tain amount of charity, were there to be found in nature. But these sys-
tems lacked any explanation of the patterns on which they were based.5
Darwin changed all that. The idea behind evolutionary taxonomy was
that if evolution was the process responsible for natural variety then a
taxonomic system based on the historical relationships between spe-
cies promised to be both fundamental and predictive. Fundamental
because evolution was the shaper of living things. Predictive because if
most characters turned out to be inherited then genealogical proximity
would predict phenotypic similarity. So this taxonomy makes an empiri-
cal wager that taxonomy based on phylogeny will be predictive, stable,
and explanatory. The Linnaean system was given a historical reinter-
pretation in terms of common descent. A genus is a cluster of species
whose common ancestor lived relatively recently. More inclusive taxo-
nomic ranks (families, orders, hierarchies), likewise, are groups related
by a common ancestor, but with the joint ancestor deeper and deeper