Abstract
THE question is often asked by students as to which is the 'right' classification of a group of animals. Mr. K. H. Chapman, lecturer in zoology, Rhodes University College, Grahamstown, South Africa, directs attention to certain ideas that must be kept in mind when considering schemes of classification from this point of view in a communication to the Editors which is summarized below. Although such conceptions have been put forward before, there persists so much misconception about the nature and purpose of systematics in biology, not only among students but also among biologists themselves, that it is necessary to re-emphasize these points. It is probable that no classification is right or definitive because there is no real classificatory system outside ourselves that it is only necessary for us to discover. In most groups it is obvious that we can only deal with survivors; and even where fossils do exist, they are unselected members of the group from this point of view. Thus it follows that natural classification is an unfortunate term. Living animals do not fall into true and equivalent groups even though we arbitrarily place them in such, and consequently we can only regard classification as a convenient tool with which to deal with a large mass of material, and it does not have a natural existence of itself. It is only necessary to compare the species, genera and other groups of insects with the similarly named categories in other phyla to realize their non-equivalence. The species, whatever it may be, also must be regarded as a dynamic and not a static unit, and any living group may, in the course of time, become something different. The question of poly-phylletic origins also arises; for example, W. A. Herdman suggested that the compound ascidians are an assemblage of groups evolved from different groups of the simple ascidians which had independently assumed the colonial habit of growth. Any classification is to be regarded as an expression of a scale of values which indicates, in the opinion of its proposer, the relative nearness or farness of two or more groups with respect to one another.
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Classification in Biology. Nature 153, 768 (1944). https://doi.org/10.1038/153768a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/153768a0