Quotes About Taxonomy

Taxonomy is described sometimes as a science and sometimes as an art, but really it's a battleground.

There was so much unrecognized novelty in the collection that at one point18 upon opening a new drawer Conway Morris famously was heard to mutter, 'Oh fuck, not another phylum.' The

humans are in the domain eucarya, in the kingdom animalia, in the phylum chordata, in the subphylum vertebrata, in the class mammalia, in the order primates, in the family hominidae, in the genus Homo, in the species sapiens.

Not until 1902, at an early meeting of the International Congress of Zoology, did naturalists begin at last to show a spirit of compromise and adopt a universal code. Taxonomy

The bottom line: higher-level taxonomy is usually unhelpful for birding. Species-level taxonomy is a matter of opinion. But in between, at the levels of family and genus, that's where taxonomy can be really helpful for birding.

The species name is kind of like your own first name (except it comes last in a plant's botanical name). The genus name is similar to your family name (except in botanical names, it comes first).

Once a small planet is discovered, astronomers try to determine which category it belongs to. This is like biologists trying to classify a new animal as either being a mammal or reptile.

I speculate over some of the Anglo nomenclature of birds: Wilson's snipe, Forster's tern . . . : What natural images do these names conjure up in our minds? What integrity do we give back to the birds with our labels.

There's a lot of essay writing that could pass for journalism and journalism that could pass for essay. Some of it is just taxonomy.

In the 1400s, people began to use a new word to define a group of animals that shared the same blood: a race.

And thus, the forms of life throughout the universe become divided into groups subordinate to groups.

In the world of information science, the tricky question of where to put things is known as the "ontology problem.

I demand of you, and of the whole world, that you show me a generic character... by which to distinguish between Man and Ape. I myself most assuredly know of none.

It's always been a dream of mine, of exploring the living world, of classifying all the species and finding out what makes up the biosphere.

I demand of you, and of the whole world, that you show me a generic character... by which to distinguish between Man and Ape. I myself most assuredly know of none.

We, as a people, we have a strong need to categorize everything. We put labels on everything and it's a totally understandable need because we are animals and we need to understand order and where to fit in.

Typically, booksellers like to put things into neat little categories.

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!"

Around the world, we are most likely to feel awe when moved by moral beauty, the first wonder of life in our taxonomy.

Unlike the heart or kidney, which have a small, defined set of cell types, we still do not have a taxonomy of neurons, and neuroscientists still argue whether specific types of neurons are unique to humans. But there is no disputing that neurons are only about 10 percent of the cells in the human brain.

Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.

Humans like nothing more than to pigeonhole the events & phenomena that punctuate their lives.

Fights are much taxonomised. They have been subject over centuries to a complex, exhaustive categoric imperative. Humans like nothing more than to pigeonhole the events & phenomena that punctuate their lives.

Many races, some of which differ so much from each other, that they have often been ranked by naturalists as distinct species.