ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´

ALTHOUGH another profession is usually accorded the distinction of being
the oldest, there is reason to believe that the honour belongs to taxonomy
(Genesis 2:20). Naming plant and animal species is still as important to
modern biology as it would have been to early humans, because without a
unique and universally applied name it is impossible to communicate information
about an organism.

At the same time as naming an organism, a taxonomist is required to
describe it formally (to characterise it morphologically) so that others
may recognise it, and distinguish it from the host of similar organisms.
In well known groups, such as mammals and birds, it is usually enough to
point out the features that separate it from its relatives.

For groups with large numbers of undescribed or poorly known species,
however, the description of a new taxon is generally included as part of
a monograph dealing with all of a group of organisms in a particular region
– the beetles of Costa Rica, for instance. Though lacking in general appeal,
these specialist treatises are the foundations upon which all popular guides
to plants and animals are built.

Simply describing vast numbers of organisms would create an unmanageable,
and largely useless, mountain of information. To handle such quantities
of data taxonomists must classify species. The earliest systems of classification,
some of which are still used by forest-dwelling peoples, were simple, utilitarian
schemes. Plants may have been classified as edible, medicinal or poisonous,
for example. An early textbook of entomology classified insects as ‘those
bestowed by the Creator as a pestilence upon mankind’ and ‘those bestowed
by the Creator for the benefit of mankind’.

Such classifications have a critical shortcoming: they tell us nothing
more about the organisms than the information that was originally used to
classify them. Modern taxonomy is no longer so anthropocentric. Biologists
seek instead to classify organisms in a hierarchical manner that reflects
their evolutionary relationships.

Probably the most profound change in taxonomic practice since the days
of Linnaeus has come in the past 20 years, with the development of better
techniques for working out those relationships.

Reasoned classifications are not mere filing systems for data, they
are highly informative. Animals sharing a recent common ancestor are likely
to share many features. So, species placed in a single genus on the basis
of a few morphological characteristics generally resemble each other in
a variety of other ways – genetically, in their behaviour and their physiology,
for instance.

A classification has two important facets: it allows us to make generalisations
about groups of organisms; and it enables us to predict some of the biological
characteristics of a newly discovered species. Economic entomologists looking
for, say, a parasitic wasp that might help to control a leafhopper pest,
can disregard many of the wasps because they can predict, from what they
know of similar wasps, that they will not attack leafhoppers.

Phylogenetic classification also provides an evolutionary perspective
to underpin other biological studies. To understand why a particular organism
does what it does the way it does, it is not enough to comprehend the forces
of natural selection that are working on it. It is also necessary to be
aware of the constraints that a species is likely to have inherited as a
result of its evolutionary history. We can deduce some measure of these
constraints from studies of related, but more ancestral, species.

Despite the increasing sophistication of taxonomy and our ability to
infer relationships between organisms and work out something of their evolutionary
history, taxonomy has come under increasing pressure in recent years. In
Britain, funding for this most basic of sciences has declined steadily,
and has become more and more centralised. Almost all taxonomic research
is carried out at the Natural History Museum in London, or, in the case
of plants, at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. The number of taxonomists
in universities is tiny and few biology students have any training in the
subject.

The research councils practically ignore projects involving taxonomy,
and with no prospects of grants to do the research, no university is likely
to run courses in systematics. In contrast, in the US, the National Science
Foundation has provided $12.8 million for systematics research in institutions
outside the Smithsonian (which receives its funding separately).

While cuts in funding at the Natural History Museum itself have been
biting deep into Britain’s capacity to keep up with taxonomic research,
learned journals, magazines and even the daily papers have published articles
encouraging those who hold the purse strings to give taxonomy far greater
priority. They invoke a variety of benefits to justify the extra spending,
ranging from a desire to describe the world’s organisms just because they
are there, to a need to describe and classify certain groups because they
may be of some immediate value to mankind.

Each reason proferred may be perfectly valid. Alone, however, each drastically
understates the need for taxonomic work. The naming, description and classification
of species is the cornerstone of biology. Unless we can communicate sensibly
and unambiguously about the organisms that are, directly or indirectly,
part of everyday life then our ability to feed and care for ourselves, and
effectively understand the world around us is seriously impaired.