Above is an image of the three largest branches of the Phylogenetic Tree of life, which is much larger and detailed that what is shown above. As I read “Classification and its Structures” by C.M. Sperberg-McQueen, I read, “Classification is, strictly speaking, the assignment of something to a class; more generally, it is the grouping together of objects into classes. A class, in turn, is a collection […] of objects which share some property.” Reading this, I instantly thought of the well known classification system for all living organisms, the Evolutionary Tree of Life.
In seventh grade biology (or ninth grade biology depending on the school you attended), you learn about a man named Charles Darwin, a British scientist from the 1800s who traveled on a five year expedition aboard the HMS Beagle. After seeing different species of animals with different traits from other species that they resemble, Darwin came to the conclusion that all life had one common ancestor and that through Natural Selection, species began branching out to form new species based on the environment.
Why do I bring up Charles Darwin? Classification is a large part of his theory and much of his research went towards classifying every living organism and by creating these classes, he gave us a map to discovering where we fall in the history of life.
We can also look at zoology, the study of animals, which looks at a smaller branch of the Tree of Life. If you go to the Colorado State University Libraries website (a link is provided below), you will find a list of animals listed in alphabetical order by their common names and their species is shown to the right. Each animal species belongs to a genus that in turn belongs to a family and so on until it becomes a matter of what is considered living and what is not.
If you look at the list, you can look at all the different animals and even change the list from alphabetical order of common names to alphabetical order of genus and species. We can take two animals of the same genus, the Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) and the Hottentot Teal (Anas punctata), and notice that despite their closeness in the Tree of Life, they have differences in characteristics like the shape of their heads. Hottentot Teals have very curvy heads while Mallards have bulb-like heads. Overall classifying animals and living organisms in general makes it much easier for us to identify what species of living organism we are dealing with and it has the same effect with anything you want to classify whether it be movies, food, or any other topic.
Works Cited:
- http://digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405103213/9781405103213.xml&chunk.id=ss1-3-2&toc.id=0&brand=9781405103213_brand
- http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/darwin_charles.shtml
- http://www.livescience.com/474-controversy-evolution-works.html
- http://lib.colostate.edu/wildlife/atoz.php?letter=ALL