Quotes About Taxonomy

It is not a simple thing to decide where we fit, for at one time or another in our lives we manage to organize in every imaginable social arrangement...We have names to label each as self, and we believe without reservation that this system of taxonomy will guarantee the entity, the absolute separateness in each of us, but the mechanism has no discernible function in the center of a crowded city; we are essentially nameless, most of our time.

Searching for alternative life on Earth might seem misconceived, because there is excellent evidence that every kind of life so far studied evolved from a common ancestor that lived billions of years ago. Yet most of the life that exists on Earth has never been properly classified.

Those objecting to the concept of race argue that the taxonomic definitions are arbitrary and subjective.

Even biologists rank species in a hierarchical order.

The position Ferry terms a "material" republication view is, as I shall also argue below, the most common view in the Reformed tradition and hardly warrants being termed a "republication" of the covenant of works in any significant sense. Ferry's taxonomy here and throughout is rather confusing and, for that reason, unhelpful

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 pseudo-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.

Elephant shrews are more closely related to elephants

The boa constrictor is the only living animal whose common name is exactly the same as its scientific name.

Ursus arctos isn't the polar bear, it's the brown bear. Ursus means "bear" in Latin and arctos means "bear" in Greek. The Arctic is named after the bear, not the other way around; it

Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.

Roberto DeMatteis had seven species

The taxonomy of medical error is vast, colorful, and at times confusing. There are slips, lapses, harmless hits, and near misses; errors of omission and of commission; operator errors, system errors, accidents, complications, and bad outcomes.

I'm doing now with cornets exactly what I used to do with trilobites: measuring, analyzing and cataloging the myriad gradations of their forms.