Quotes About Taxonomy

I don't know where to put whales. I'm sticking them here, but I don't have any reason for it.

I have worked really hard to defy categorization, to break down a taxonomy whenever it comes my way.

It had been a thudding bore of a day; rain had kept Evie inside at the museum, where she amused herself by rearranging the books on one shelf according to a taxonomy only she understood.

I do not want you to believe any of this because it is all crap, but it is the crap in which the piles of our psuedo-European culture are embedded, so you had better understand it because no one who does not understand the history and taxonomy of crap will ever come to know the difference between crap and pseudocrap and noncrap....

Geology shows that fossils are of different ages. Paleontology shows a fossil sequence, the list of species represented changes through time. Taxonomy shows biological relationships among species. Evolution is the explanation that threads it all together. Creationism is the practice of squeezing one's eyes shut and wailing "Does not!"

Genome sequencing has changed taxonomy.

Game theory is a branch of, originally, applied mathematics, used mostly in economics and political science, a little bit in biology, that gives us a mathematical taxonomy of social life, and it predicts what people are likely to do and believe others will do in cases where everyone's actions affect everyone else.

Fun fact: there are also 3,000 varieties of pears. That's right. Even PEARS are more complicated than you thought!

De acuerdo con las reglas usuales de la biología, los seres humanos también deberíamos ser clasificados como chimpancés (Pan sapiens), y es solo nuestra inclinación natural a vernos como algo especial la que nos lleva a clasificarnos como un género distinto, el Homo.

I love taxonomies, categories, ways of dividing people into groups.

The chief virtue of Bloom's Taxonomy was its simplicity: six categories, not sixty.

Humans have this need to name everything, no matter how little that thing may deserve it.

It's so weird all the different names they have for groups of animals. They have pride of lions, school of fish, rack of lamb. . . .

A fly was very close to being called a land, because that's what it does half the time.

We may have lumped several different diseases together in describing the syndrome.

Some fifteen to twenty Burgess species cannot be allied with any known group, and should probably be classified as separate phyla. Magnify some of them beyond the few centimeters of their actual size, and you are on the set of a science-fiction film...

Consider the magnitude of this... Taxonomists have described almost a million species of arthropods, and all fit into four major groups; one quarry in British Columbia, representing the first explosion of multicellular life, reveals more than twenty additional arthropod designs!

He was blushing. Christ, the kid was so transparent. "Harry, are you going to tell me you've got a girlfriend?" I asked. The blush deepened, and I laughed. "I'll be damned," I said. "Good for you." He looked at me, checking to see whether I was going to tease him. "She's not exactly my girlfriend." "Well, never mind the taxonomy. How did you meet her?" "Work.

If I could remember the names of all these particles, I'd be a botanist.

One would think that plants belonging to the same genus would always produce identical or at least similar oils. But this is by no means so.

Without the name, any flower is still more or less a stranger to you. The name betrays its family, its relationship to other flowers, and gives the mind something tangible to grasp. It is very difficult for persons who have had no special training to learn the names of the flowers from the botany.

As I grow wiser and more skeptical, I realize that almost everything in nomenclature comes full circle. The question remains whether I can outlast the taxonomists.

The war on drugs is in truth a war on some drugs, their enemy status the result of historical accident, cultural prejudice, and institutional imperative. The taxonomy on behalf of which this war is being fought would be difficult to explain to an extraterrestrial, or even a farmer like Matyas.

My notes are an anarchy of disputatious taxonomy I see no need to inflict on the reader.