Lecture 3 - Taxonomy

Question 1

How many known species are there?

Answer 1

1.8 million known species

Question 1

What’s a biological species?

Answer 1

A group of populations whose members have the potential to interbreed and produce viable, fertile offspring: they do not produce viable fertile offspring with members of other groups

Question 2

What is the estimate on total diversity of life?

Answer 2

10-100 million species

Question 3

Why are the estimates so variable?

Answer 3

Majority of organisms are tiny and easily overlooked and there are many hard to reach habitats. Also many of them look similar but they are actually genetically distinct

Question 4

Why do we care about how many species are in the world?

Answer 4

Species are being lost at 1000 times the background extinction rate.

Question 5

What are the 2 greek words for taxonomy?

Answer 5

taxis: arrangement and nomia: method

Question 6

What does taxonomy mean?

Answer 6

it is the scientific discipline for organisms to be named, defined, and classified. We can organize living things into categories to help make sense of the vast diversity

Question 7

Who is the father of taxonomy?

Answer 7

Carolus Linnaeus, he developed both hierarchical classification and binomial nomenclature

Question 8

All life is organized into a hierarchy of?

Answer 8

taxa

Question 9

What are the components of the linnaean taxonomic system?

Answer 9

domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species

Question 10

What is binomial nomenclature?

Answer 10

two part format for assigning scientific names to species. Capitalize the first letter of genus name and then lower case all letters of the species name. if typing its italicized but underline when hand written

Question 11

phylogeny?

Answer 11

the evolutionary history of a species

Question 12

phylogenetic tree?

Answer 12

diagram that shows the evolutionary history between species

Question 13

systematics?

Answer 13

a disciple that classifies organisms ad determines their evolutionary relationships

Question 14

whats the difference between taxonomy and phylogeny?

Answer 14

taxonomy is classifying organisms and phylogeny is determining evolutionary relationships

Question 15

what was darwins influence on classification?

Answer 15

darwin said that all living species descended from a series of common ancestors. similarities arose through inheritance of characters from the ancestors and the differences arose through evolution and adaptation to different environments. this process was called descent with modification

Question 16

clade, branch point, and root?

Answer 16

clade: group of organisms who are believed to have evolved from a common ancestor. branch point: represents the split from the common ancestor. root: common ancestor to all species in the tree

Question 17

what are derived traits?

Answer 17

characteristics that clades have in common that was absent in their ancestor

Question 18

natural vs artificial classification system?

Answer 18

systematics is a natural classification system because it groups living things into phylogenies based on real evolutionary relationships
systems that classify organisms based on a few morphological characters are considered artificial classification systems because similar morphological traits may not reflect actual relatedness

Question 19

is the linnaean taxonomy system artificial or natural?

Answer 19

artificial because it is based on morphological traits

Question 20

originally there was how many kingdoms?

Answer 20

2: plants and animals

Question 21

what about 1960 how many kingdoms?

Answer 21

monera, protista, plantae, fungi, animalia

Question 22

what about now? how many domains of life?

Answer 22

bacteria, archaea, and eukarya : all arose from a single common ancestor