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Assigning Scientific Names
• We assign scientific names because each place in the world has different names for animals.
• Ex. in the UK the word “Buzzard” means a hawk, while in the US it means a vulture
• A Swedish botanist came up with a two word naming system called binomial nomenclature where each species is assigned a two part scientific name.
Classifying Species into Larger Groups
• Scientists tried to classify organisms into larger groups that have a biological meaning
• This process of organizing living thing is called systematics
The Linnaean Classification System
• Linnaeus found a way to group species into taxa, or larger groups
• Over time his system expanded into seven hierarchical taxa: Species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, and kingdom with kingdom being the most general and encompassing all multicellular organisms, and species being the most specific
Problems With Traditional Classification
• Over time systematics have emphasized a variety of differences between those of the same species
• There is already a natural classification of organisms determined by with whom they mate
A branching diagram depicting the successive points of species divergence from common ancestral lines without regard to the degree of deviation.