Importance in Biological Classification
The idea of species has a long history. It is one of the most important levels of classification, for several reasons:
- It often corresponds to what lay people treat as the different basic kinds of organism – dogs are one species, cats another.
- It is the standard binomial nomenclature (or trinomial nomenclature) by which scientists typically refer to organisms.
- It is the highest taxonomic level that cannot be made more or less inclusionary.
After years of use, the concept remains central to biology and a host of related fields, and yet also remains at times ill-defined.
Read more about this topic: Species
Famous quotes containing the words importance in, importance and/or biological:
“The Mississippi, the Ganges, and the Nile,... the Rocky Mountains, the Himmaleh, and Mountains of the Moon, have a kind of personal importance in the annals of the world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“People without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys imagination. This means that people are not really tired of comfort, culture and leisure, but of the use to which they are put, which is precisely what stops us enjoying them.”
—Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934)
“Much of the ill-tempered railing against women that has characterized the popular writing of the last two years is a half-hearted attempt to find a way back to a more balanced relationship between our biological selves and the world we have built. So women are scolded both for being mothers and for not being mothers, for wanting to eat their cake and have it too, and for not wanting to eat their cake and have it too.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)