The Father of Taxonomy

Taxonomy is a branch of biology concerned with naming and classifying organisms based on their relationship to each other. The taxonomy in use today originated with Carl Linnaeus (also Carolus or Carl von Linne), born in 1707 in Stenbrohult, Sweden. Young Linnaeus possessed a love of plants, which he put to use as an adult working for Sweden’s Royal Science Society. Linnaeus traveled the country collecting specimens for the society and in the process developed a reputation as a skilled botanist. In 1735 he moved to the Netherlands to devote time to the science of plant life and the resemblances he saw between certain seemingly unrelated plants. Linnaeus rearranged plant classifications that had been used in biology since Aristotle and published a new scheme in Genera Plantarum. The scheme contained groupings based on detailed likenesses between species rather than gross appearances.

Linnaeus’s new hierarchy met with a combination of criticism and indifference from the scientific community, so he retreated to Sweden, married, and became professor of natural sciences at the University of Uppsala. But he continued studying plant life based on similarities and differences in structure, color, reproduction, and other physical traits, and published Species Plantarum in 1753. A younger generation of botanists understood the value of classifying plants to the species level, as Linnaeus had proposed. Linnaeus received satisfaction for more than just scientific merit; part of his motivation had come from a desire to honor God’s plan by understanding the world of living things.

The hallmark of the Linnaeus system resides in characteristics called differentia specifica. These unique characteristics make every organism distinct from all others and enable biologists to classify each new organism they discover without confusing it with others already described. The system additionally made order of all species by grouping them into genera, genera into orders, orders into classes, and classes into two kingdoms. Most significantly, each species can be distinguished by a name that contains both genus and species. Therefore biologists speak of tigers as Panthera tigris, an iguana as Dipsosaurus dosalis, a redwood tree as Sequoia sempervirens, and so on.

Following Linnaeus’s death in 1784, taxonomists paid closer attention to species ancestry. In 1857 Carl von Nageli proposed that fungi and bacteria be placed in the plant kingdom, but Ernst Haeckel suggested in 1866 that bacteria, protozoa, algae, and fungi belonged to a new kingdom called Protista because they seemed related to neither plants nor animals.

Biologists today use nucleic acid sequencing to trace ancestral roots and electron microscopy to study minute differences in cell structures. These methods have enabled taxonomists to alter schemes that had not changed in 100 years. Studies on deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA) reveal that all living things belong to one of three domains: Bacteria, Archaea, or Eukarya. Molecular biology may uncover additional ways to classify organisms so that the present system may again change in coming years. Linnaeus’s dedication to finding a standard system for classifying biota built a standard for generations of scientists to follow.

Source of Information : Green Technology Biodiversity