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Challenges for taxonomy

Nature volume 417, pages 17–19 (2002)Cite this article

The discipline will have to reinvent itself if it is to survive and flourish.

Taxonomy, the classification of living things, has its origins in ancient Greece and in its modern form dates back nearly 250 years, to when Linnaeus introduced the binomial classification still used today. Linnaeus, of course, hugely underestimated the number of plants and animals on Earth. As subsequent workers began to describe more and more species, often in ignorance of each others' work, the resulting confusion and chaos threatened to destroy the whole enterprise while still in its infancy. In today's jargon, we might call this the first bioinformatics crisis. Using the tools then available, nineteenth-century taxonomists solved this crisis in a brilliant way that has served the subject well since then. They invented a complex set of rules that determine how a species should be named and associated with a type specimen; how generic and higher taxonomic categories should be handled; and how conflicts over the application of names should be resolved. All these rules revolved around publications in books and scientific journals, and their descendants form the current codes of zoological and biological nomenclature.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the many taxonomists and other biologists who have debated these issues with me.

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  1. Department of Biological Sciences, NERC Centre for Population Biology, Imperial College at Silwood Park, Ascot, SL5 7PY, Berkshire, UK

    H. Charles J. Godfray

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  1. H. Charles J. Godfray
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Godfray, H. Challenges for taxonomy. Nature 417, 17–19 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/417017a

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