Evolutionary Taxonomy - Origin of Evolutionary Taxonomy

Origin of Evolutionary Taxonomy

Evolutionary taxonomy arose as a result of Linnaean taxonomy being influenced by the theory of evolution. The idea of the Linnaean taxonomy as translating into a sort of dendrogram of the Animal- and Plant Kingdoms was formulated toward the end of the 18th century, well before the On the Origin of Species was published. Among early works exploring the idea of a transmutation of species was Erasmus Darwin's 1796 Zoönomia and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's Philosophie Zoologique of 1809. The idea was popularised in the Anglophone world by the speculative, but widely read Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published anonymously by Robert Chambers in 1844.

With Darwin's theory, this thought got a theoretical basis, and Tree of Life representations became popular in scientific works. Very limited knowledge of the fossil record at the time hindered the drawing of specific inferences about the ancestors of modern groups. Both in Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and On the Origin of Species, the ancestor remained largely a hypothetical species, and Darwin was primarily occupied with showing the principle, and very carefully refrained from speculating on relationship between living or fossil organisms, using theoretical examples only.

One of the first fossil groups to be recognized was dinosaurs, formally named by Richard Owen in 1842. With Darwin's theory of evolution being known, Thomas Henry Huxley used the fossils of Archaeopteryx and Hesperornis to pronounce the birds descendants of the dinosaurs. Thus, a group of extant animals could be tied to a fossil group. The resulting description, that of dinosaurs "giving rise to" or being "the ancestors of" birds, is the essential hallmark of evolutionary taxonomic thinking.