Diversity of life and Need of classification?
Look around, what do you observe?definitely you will see non living objects like rocks, Rivers, ponds, buildings and sky etc., besides non living objects you might also notice living organisms like, cow, dog, birds, butterflies, forests and many more organisms and what else you might notice is that each organisms is different to a lesser or greater extent i.e., the life forms are very diverse . Have you ever imagined as to what was the need of giving names to these organisms? In fact the inquisitive nature of the human beings to know about each and every organism around him, has been the reason to name them. Moreover the very inquisitive instinct of human being to know about his surroundings has been the main reason for placing organisms in groups where the study of only a few
representatives of that group could enhance the knowledge about the whole group. some estimates about the total number of types of living organisms on earth range between 3 to 5 million and it would not have been possible for a man to study each type of organism during his life time.
The branch of biology which deals with the scientific study of diversity of the organisms and their evolutionary relationships is called as SYSTEMATICS .
Systematic came into being when human became civilized because at that time the need to identify the important and unimportant organisms was started to be felt.
I would add one more point to the discussion that when we visit a library and intend to borrow a book of physiology , what do we do? How do we search the Book? we go to the compartment where the Almirah containing books of zoology would be kept. Then we would search the book on the particular shelf which would be meant for the books pertaining to physiology. Imagine if the books of all subjects say botany,zoology,chemistry, physics, English would have been kept in a haphazard manner, would you have been able to search the book? I say no and even if you say yes it would have consumed a lot of time. So the above discussion leads us to the result that placing the books of each specialization together saved our time and energy. In the Same way time and manpower would be saved in studying the animal diversity, when we place the organisms in the groups based on similar features.
Placing the organisms in groups based on the similarities and difference in their traits is called CLASSIFICATION .
The branch of systematics which involves naming, describing and classification of organisms is called as TAXONOMY.
Naming the organisms is the first step in taxonomy and is called as NOMENCLATURE.
Regards
Dr Rahul Kait
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