Early taxonomy was based on arbitrary criteria, the so-called 'artificial systems', including Linnaeus's system of sexual classification. There are a number of stages in this scientific thinking. While some descriptions of taxonomic history attempt to date taxonomy to ancient civilizations, a truly scientific attempt to classify organisms did not occur until the 18th century.Įarlier works were primarily descriptive, and focused on plants that were useful in agriculture or medicine. William Bertram Turrill introduced the term 'alpha taxonomy' in a series of papers published in 19 in which he discussed the philosophy and possible future directions of the discipline of taxonomy. In earlier literature, the term had a different meaning, referring to morphological taxonomy, and the products of research through the end of the 19th century. The term 'alpha taxonomy' is primarily used today to refer to the discipline of finding, describing, and naming taxa, particularly species. With the advent of such fields of study as phylogenetics, cladistics, and systematics, the Linnaean system has progressed to a system of modern biological classification based on the evolutionary relationships between organisms, both living and extinct. The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus is regarded as the father of taxonomy, as he developed a system known as Linnaean classification for categorization of organisms and binomial nomenclature for naming organisms. Organisms are grouped together into taxa (singular: taxon) and these groups are given a taxonomic rank groups of a given rank can be aggregated to form a super group of lower rank, thus creating a taxonomic hierarchy.
Taxonomy is the science of defining groups of biological organisms on the basis of shared characteristics and giving names to those groups.
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