Biological

classification
🐟
 SCOPE

Historical
Out of the
Developmen
Modern Box!
t
Classificatio
n(s)
 1.
Historical Development
Let’s start
Very Obvious Start Though! 😋
 Aristotle
(384-322 BC)

1.Historical Development
 AS it started by Aristotle
Known to be the first person to
study biology ‘systematically’
Distinguished about 500
species of birds, mammals
and fishes
Used words genos (Kind) and
edios (Specific form)
1.Historical Development
Spent two years observing and Mentioned the internal anatomy
describing the zoology of Lesbos of roughly 110 animals
(Greece) and the surrounding
seas
Books
Classified all the ‘creations’
History Of Animals
📖 from lower to higher being,
also classified animals based
📖 On The Soul on having blood and type of
it (hot or cold)
 Historical Keypoints

Atharvaveda mentions Theofrastus wrote John Ray gave first

about 1500 medcine first book on Botany formal definition of
plant species , genera & family

~1500 ~384-322 ~370-284 ~1561- ~1686

BC BC BC 1624 AD AD

Aristotle wrote First Bahuin described

Book on Zoology, 6000+ plants, used
First Systematical many ‘two worded
study name’ & Classified
them
1.Historical Development
 Carl Linnaeus
(1707 – 1778)

1.Historical Development
 The revolutions begins!

(Re)Introduced taxonomy, Established three kingdoms – Two Classified kingdoms based on

binomial nomenclature, kingdom system for living Class, Order, Family , Genus And
consistently used it for 10000+ organisms -animals, Species
species vegetables and rest to
kingdom minerals

Books

For the first time in history Used trivial name instead

Systema Naturae
human kind shared a common
group with other animals (as
📖 of descriptive name for
recognizing a species
Anthropomorpha , a then
group for Primates)
📖 Philosophia Botanica
📖 Species Plantarum
1.Historical Development
 So how the kingdoms were
divided?

✣ If they can move or cannot

✣ How they take their food

Then the kingdoms were further divided into

class, order, family, genus and species according
to their similarities and dissimilarities based on
habit, habitat and morphology

1.Historical Development
 2.a
Modern Classification(s)
 19th century : new waves arrive

Microscope On the origin of Heredity & Gene

Bacteria & many other species Significant discovery
micro-organisms show Darwin shook the idea of by Mendel but had no
up. Though they were fixed species and how all major instant
known before Linnaeus these started influence until it was
born, he just simply re-discovered later
ignored them

2.Modern Classfications
 How all that fit in

✣ All newly discovered micro-organism, fungi

and algae were incorporated into Kingdom
Plantae for some time
✣ Besides anatomy and morphology,
evolutionary history and cell structure became
important factors
✣ The positions of species were frequently re-
arranged based on updated information

2.Modern Classfications
 official Ranks(1866 to onwards)

✣ The name of a speceis is

restricted by ICZN and ICN
✣ However, the position of a
species in a certain taxon is
subjective and open to
debate
✣ A new rank Phylum was
introduced in between
kingdom and class by
Haeckel (1866)

2.Modern Classfications
 The collapse of two kingdom system

✣ After the microsopic revolution the

two kingdom system failed to hold
places for the newly discovered
microorganisms
✣ Ernest Haekel for the first time in
more than two tousand years fisrt
proposed a third Kingdom- PROTISTA
✣ In stead of having common
charecteristics Kingdom Protista
incuded species which are not animal
nor plant
Ernest haeckel
(1834-1919)
2.Modern Classfications
 Rise of more new kindoms

Linnaeus, Haeckel, Chatton, Copeland, Whittaker,

1735 1866 1925 1938 1969
Vegetabilia Plantae Eukaryota Plantae Plantae
Fungi
Animalia Animalia Animalia Animalia
Protista Protista Protista
Prokaryota Monera Monera

2.Modern Classfications
 Archaea: lately known, highly ranked

✣ First thought to be different kind of bacteria found

in extreme environment
✣ Later it was discovered almost in normal
environment to and in large quantity
✣ Meanwhile sequence of genes became a vital base
for classification of living organism
✣ In 1977 by Carl Woese and George E. Fox classified
them as a different kind of prokaryotes based on
the sequences of rRNA genes

2.Modern Classfications
Archaea: lately known, highly
ranked
 Domain: A rank over kingdom

✣ They claimed Archaea has more distant relation

with Bacteria than it is between Eucaryota and
Bacteria
✣ Studies also showed that it has a unique evolution
history of their own
✣ Woese classified life in three different sections,
Archaea, Bacteria & Eukaryota, Each called a
Domain – A rank ever higher than kingdom
✣ Despite being very popular and commonly used
Domain is not yet an official rank

2.Modern Classfications
 From domain to species

2.Modern Classfications
Human taxonomy in modern
Linnaean taxonomy
 What about a new species or
rank?

✣ Taxonomists or researchers are free to use or

propose a new rank or omit a rank anytime in their
paper if they feel the need
✣ But it’s a long way to get official recognition,
generally there will be a consensus to make such
change
✣ The name of a new species on the other hand is
normally the first name mentioned in the earliest
paper meeting the code
✣ As one may think there are actually many school of
taxonomists whose preference vary a lot when it’s
come to the question of classification
2.Modern Classfications
 Atharvaveda Started with
1500+

1,700,000+
So far documented!
But with estimated 1 trillion
possible solution to life,
We have just came across only
1/10th of 1 percent!
 2.b
Clash of clade vs. taxon
A new age begins!
 Linnaean classification: revolutionary
but is it scientific enough?

✣ As new data arrived analyzing gene codes and the

understanding of evolutionary process, the current
classification system has been being criticized by lots
of researchers
✣ Diving elements into Metal and non-mental is handy to
some extent but has lots of limitations and this is now
a days viewed as Artificial classification and
Unscientific too
✣ This gave rise to many alternative classifications to
name a few Phylogeny, Phenetics etc.

2.Modern Classfications
All that glitters is not gold!
 Evolution: Helping tool or prime key

✣ Phylogenetic systematics-arranged from

ancestor to it’s decedents
✣ All decedents of a common ancestor form a
group name Clade
✣ Rank or taxa is not really that important
✣ Changes rapidly according to the new data set
✣ May put in very different lives in a common
group (Like Sodium and Hydrogen!)

2.Modern Classfications
Luca : Greaaaaaaaa………….aaat grand father !?

✣
✣ Last
  Universal common ancestor
✣ Not necessarily the first life on earth
✣ The universal common ancestor of all present
life
✣ Darwin hypnotized first, a tree of life
✣ Though similar but very much different from
their previous ones in sense
✣ First formal test was done in 2010, claims the
probability to
 Does LUCA make sense?

✣ No other strong alternate hypothesis

✣ Lots of amino acids are possible, all lives
share a few common
✣ Horizontal gene transfer
✣ Same biochemistry , same basic cycle
Who before whom?
The tree of life
 3
Out of the box
Hello world
✣ Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) was unable to
find the pathogen behind rabies ,
reports it is too small to be seen through
microscope
✣ In 1892 Dmitri Ivanovsky describes a
non-bacterial pathogen, later isolated by
Martinus Beijerinck , the tobacco mosaic
virus
✣ Though nuclear acid is present, there is
no cell structure, known as the unit of
life
 Life , not life or in between?

Organism like behavior

Organism like behavior

✣ No cell
✣ No metabolism
✣ Possesses gene
✣ No cell division or
✣ Reproductive growth process, rather
✣ Evolve by natural assembling
selection ✣ Can be destroyed but no
‘death’, needs nothing
to survive
 Position in biological classification

✣ Most biologists do not recognize virus as a

form of live, however things are yet to be
settled
✣ High mutation rate of virus is a great obstacle
to find whether they has it’s own or separate
evolutionary history
✣ In 2012 Stefan Luketa proposed a five domain
system including virus (Virobiota-acceluar
having nucleic acid) and prions(Prionobiota-
acceluler not having nuclic acid)
 Thanks!
Any questions?
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