[b]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.
How It Works
Taxonomy in Context
The term taxonomy is actually just one of several related words describing various aspects of classification in the biological sciences. In keeping with the spirit of order and intellectual tidiness that governs all efforts to classify, let us start with the most general concept, which happens to be classification itself. Classification is a very broad term, with applications far beyond the biological sciences, that simply refers to the act of systematically arranging ideas or objects into categories according to specific criteria.
While its meaning is narrower than that of classification, even taxonomy still has broader applications than the way in which it is used in the biological sciences. In a general sense, taxonomy refers to the study of classification or to methods of classification—for example, "political taxonomy," as we used it in the introduction to this essay. Literary critics sometimes refer to a writer's taxonomy of characters. Within the biological sciences, however, the term designates specifically a subdiscipline involving the process and study of the identification, naming, and classification of organisms according to apparent common characteristics.
Phylogeny and Nomenclature
Two other terms that one is likely to run across in the study of taxonomy are phylogeny and nomenclature. Phylogeny is the evolutionary history of organisms, particularly as that history refers to the relationships between life-forms and the broad lines of descent that unite them. Taxonomy is less fundamental a concept than phylogeny. Whereas taxonomy is a human effort to give order to all the data, phylogeny is the true evolutionary relationship between living organisms. Some scientists call phylogeny the tree of life, meaning that it represents the underlying hierarchical structure by which life-forms evolved and are related to one another[/b]
الأحد فبراير 19, 2017 9:16 am من طرف elrayek
موضوع: taxonomy 
