18.1 Finding Order in DiversityBy: Natalie Baumann

Assigning Scientific Names

• We assign scientific names because each place in the world has different names for animals.

• Ex. in the UK the word “Buzzard” means a hawk, while in the US it means a vulture

• A Swedish botanist came up with a two word naming system called binomial nomenclature where each species is assigned a two part scientific name.

Classifying Species into Larger Groups

• Scientists tried to classify organisms into larger groups that have a biological meaning

• This process of organizing living thing is called systematics

The Linnaean Classification System

• Linnaeus found a way to group species into taxa, or larger groups

• Over time his system expanded into seven hierarchical taxa: Species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, and kingdom with kingdom being the most general and encompassing all multicellular organisms, and species being the most specific

Problems With Traditional Classification

• Over time systematics have emphasized a variety of differences between those of the same species

• There is already a natural classification of organisms determined by with whom they mate

A branching diagram depicting the successive points of species divergence from common ancestral lines without regard to the degree of deviation.

Evolution any process of formation or growth; development: the evolution of a language

Derived Character- trait that appears in recent parts of a lineage, but not in its ancestors

Common Ancestors

A clade- A group of species that includes a single common ancestor and all descendants of that ancestor