Have You Stuck With Biology Taxonomy
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Have you stuck with biology taxonomy

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‘Biological classification, or scientific categorization in biology, is a technique to group and categorize organisms into sets for example genus or species. These groups are well-known as taxa (singular: taxon). Biological categorization is part of scientific taxonomy.

Modern biological taxonomy has its root in the work of Carolus Linnaeus, who grouped species consistent with shared physical characteristics. These groupings have since been revised to get better consistency with the Darwinian principle of general descent. With the beginning of the cladistic method in the late 20th century, phylogenetic taxonomy in which organisms are assembled based purely on inferred evolutionary relatedness, ignoring morphological likeness has become general in some areas of biology. Molecular phylogenetics uses DNA sequences as information, has also driven many recent revisions and is likely to continue doing so. Biological cataloging belongs to the science of biological systematic.

Definition

Categorization has been defined by Ernst Mayr as "The organization of entities in a hierarchical series of nested classes, in which related or related classes at one hierarchical level are combined broadly into more inclusive classes at the next higher level." A class is described as "a collection of similar entities".

What creates biological classification dissimilar from other classification systems (for instance classifying books in a library) is evolution: the similarity among organisms located in the same taxon is not arbitrary, but is in its place a result of shared descent from their nearest general ancestor. Consequently, the important attributes or traits for biological classification are 'homologous', i.e., inherited from general ancestors. These must be estranged from traits that are analogous. Therefore birds and bats both have the power of flight, but this similarity is not used to categorize them into a taxon (a "class"), because it is not inherited from a ordinary ancestor. In spite of all the other dissimilarities between them, the fact that bats and whales both feed their young on milk is one of the aspects used to classify both of them as mammals, since it was inherited from a general ancestor(s).

Determining whether similarities are homologous or analogous can be complicated. Thus until newly, golden moles, found in South Africa, were located in the same taxon (insectivores) as Northern Hemisphere moles, on behalf of morphological and behavioral similarities. Though, molecular analysis has shown that they are not directly related, so that their similarities must be because of convergent evolution and not to common descent, and so should not be used to put them in the same taxon.

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