Abstract
IN much of the academic teaching of biology at the present time, the view is expressed or implied that biological classification is meaningless except as a more or less convenient device for filing herbarium sheets or arranging our animal specimens on shelves, the inference being that our search for a natural system of classification is futile, because no natural system exists. It is possible that if we could cross-examine one of those who despise the work of the systematist, we might find him reluctant to go quite so far as this. We all, even the youngest of us, profess to accept the doctrine of evolution, if only as a convenient weapon with which to meet the fundamentalists, and we can scarcely believe in evolution while denying altogether that, in Darwin's words, “community of descent… is the bond which, though obscured by various degrees of modification, is partially revealed to us by our classifications”. Darwin, indeed, saw clearly, so early as 1842, that “the natural system ought to be a genealogical one” and the idea was old even then. It is implicit in Buff on, in 1766, and Lamarck seems to take it for granted. Why then must we now abandon it, and what is to take its place ?
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Calman, W. The Meaning of Biological Classification. Nature 136, 9–10 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/136009a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/136009a0