We explain what taxonomy is, what levels of organization it uses and the objectives set by this science.
What is Taxonomy?
It is understood by taxonomy to the science of classification: its name comes from Greek words taxis (“ordering”) and nomos (“norm, knowledge”).
It is generally considered a branch of biological sciences (specifically Systematic Biology) that deals with the classification of living organisms of which there is news to date.
To do this, it uses the concepts of taxon and phylogenetic tree:
- Taxon A taxon is a level of organization of living beings, a group of living beings endowed with circumscription, position and rank within the evolutionary history of life. This means:
- District Organisms within one taxon are clearly differentiated from those belonging to another, based on a list of diagnostic characters or properties exclusive to the group.
- Range. Within the same taxon, living beings emerged at different times in time, and that particular story of their origin means that some appeared before others, forming a kind of family.
- Position. The taxa differ from each other and also present a hierarchical history of their origin, so in turn the living beings of the same taxon occupy a certain place in the general history of life.
- Phylogenetic tree The phylogenetic tree is a way of illustrating the way in which life evolved from its origins to today, using a kind of family tree whose branches represent the different evolutionary paths that a species takes to become two or more different, completely different species. new. This way of representing life allows us to classify beings based on their participation in that evolutionary history.
The point of taxonomy is, then, that there are different ways of understanding this history of the origin of species, and based on each version, it is possible to build a different model of categories and classification.
Thus, in different phylogenetic trees, the branches can be occupied by very different evolutionary groups, depending on what characteristics are chosen to distinguish between one or other living beings.
See also: Systematics
Objective of taxonomy
Viewed this way, taxonomy is a discipline that pursues the most probable story of the origin of life and the process of transformations that resulted in the appearance of contemporary humans and animals that we know well.
Furthermore, the history of taxonomy, one of the specific branches of this discipline, allows us to know the way in which human beings have chosen to classify living beings, in order not only to avoid making mistakes already made or to rescue knowledge. discarded at the time but necessary, but also to understand more deeply the cultural way in which we think about life and the world around us.
