Each of us has our own name. The name contains a lot of information, such as the family name, and perhaps your parents’ expectations for you. Some foreigners also add ancestors to their children’s names. Named in memory of ancestors. With a name, we can distinguish ourselves from others in social life. Some people give themselves "pen names" or "stage names" out of hobbies or work needs. These personalized names can sometimes be more reminiscent of the characteristics of their owners. So, where do the names of the thousands of biological species in the world come from? How do people name them?
As early as the ancient Greek era, the great philosopher Aristotle proposed the definition of genus plus species to simply classify animals and plants. Later people followed his classification method Name and classify plants and animals. However, with the progress of human civilization, especially the development of modern science, in the 16th and 17th centuries, scientists continued to discover a large number of animals and plants.
It’s like there are only a few dozen books on your bookshelf. Although some of them are novels and some are textbooks, it is easier to find them after they are classified; however, suppose you have a large collection of books. , such as one hundred thousand copies, then there will be many problems if we continue to use the original rough and simple classification method.
On the one hand, because the original classification is not detailed enough, there are still a large number of books under a certain category, and they are also very different from each other; on the other hand, because there are too many books gathered under a certain category, There are so many books out there that trying to find a certain book is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Scientists at the time faced similar difficulties. To solve this problem, scientists mainly use two classification methods to classify animals and plants.
One is the "natural classification method", which is to classify a certain organism based on its various organ shapes (such as the shape of plant roots, the shape of calyx, the shape of petals, etc.); the other is One is "artificial classification", which is to classify organisms only based on a few organs, sometimes even the shape of a certain organ. Both methods have pros and cons. The Swedish naturalist Linnaeus was the originator of modern biological taxonomy. His main contribution to biological classification methods was the establishment of a more complete artificial classification method and binomial nomenclature.
He divided living things into classes, orders, genera, and species. At the same time, considering that the academic world at that time was in a chaotic state regarding the naming of organisms - for the same species, you have your name, and I have my name - he proposed a method that included the "genus name" and The binomial nomenclature of "species name" means that any species is named by combining two Latin names. This simple and effective naming method has been widely accepted by the academic community and produced good results. Summary:
The emergence and development of biological taxonomy has made us realize how important it is to use scientific and reasonable methods in scientific research. I hope this will also be helpful to our learning and thinking.