There is enormous biological
diversity!
There are almost 8.7 million species on this
earth. This number is rapidly increasing every day. This mind boggling number
makes it almost impossible to study each and every day. This mind boggling
number makes it almost impossible to study each and every organism
individually. Therefore, scientists felt that these organisms must be grouped
in some fashion into discrete categories. This not only made their job simpler
but also helped to characterize them. This was beginning of a system of
classification. The categorization however cants be random e.g., if we list
names or words in a telephone directory or dictionary randomly, we shall never
be able to find or locate a particular telephone number or meaning of a
particular word. Therefore, a uniform and universal scientific system of
classification was developed for the organisms.
A taxonomist’s job didn’t get over by merely
classifying the organisms; the organisms also needed a scientific name. Since
the organisms are known differently at different places and their common names
are used casually, it creates confusion, e.g. a silver fish is an insect and
not a fish; similarly, sea mouse is not even distantly related with a mouse.
Hence, it necessitated a code of naming or nomenclature. A number of attempts
were made in this direction but success came to the famous Swedish naturalist
Carlus Linnaeus who developed the
system of Bionomial Nomenclature in
his book called Systems Naturae in 1758.
This distinction earned him the title of “Father of Taxonomy”.
According to his code of nomenclature , (“Bi”
meaning “two”), the name of every living organism consists of two words – the first word, referring to generic name (name of the genus ),
which is common with other related forms, and the second word is species name which is unique for a particular
organism. The two together specify the name of the species e.g.,
Homo sapiens (Man, the wise) is the scientific name of
“Modern man” where Homo is
the name of the genus and sapiens is
the name of species
.
