Taxonomy

Term | Definition | Systematic Biology / Systematics | * Study of the biodiversity * Quatitative science that uses the characteristics of living and fossil organisms(traits) to infer relationships between organisms over time | Taxonomy | * Branch of systematic biology * Process of identifying, naming and organising biodiversity into related categories | Taxon | General name for a group containing an organisms or groups of organisms that exhibit a set of shared traits | Classification | Process of naming and assigning organisms or groups of organisms to a taxon | Taxonomists | Scientists that study taxonomy | Aristotle’s sorting | * Sort organisms into groups based on shared traits * Horses, birds, and oaks * Relied on physical traits to classify organisms * Proved to be problematic * Similar features are caused by convergent evolution, not from the common ancestor | Natural Groups | * Grouping of organisms that represent a shared evolutionary history * Classified by: 1. Using a set of traits to construct a phylogeny 2. Evolutionary ‘famliy tree’ | Carolus Linnaean | * Father of modern taxonomy * Develop binomial nomenclature * Each species received two-part Latin name * The first word is the genus, the second word is the specific epithet * In italics | Reasons having scientific name | * A common name varies from country to country due to language difference * People speaking the same language sometimes use different common names to describe the same organism * The same common name is given to two different organisms * Latin is a universal language, known by scholars | Cladistics | * A method that uses shared, derived traits to develop a hypothesis of evolutionary history * Uses a cladogram to achieve this * Apply the principle of parsimony (the simplest solution is the optimal solution) | Homology | * Structural similarities that stems from having a common ancestor *