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11 - What Is the Basis of Biological Classification?

The Search for Natural Systems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 September 2020

By
Thomas A. C. Reydon
Edited by
Kostas Kampourakis  and
Tobias Uller
Kostas Kampourakis
Affiliation:
Université de Genève
Tobias Uller
Affiliation:
Lunds Universitet, Sweden
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Summary

Life on Earth is astonishingly diverse. Biologists have so far discovered, named, and described approximately 1.9 million species of organisms (Ruggiero et al. 2015). But on most counts, this is only a very small part of the actual diversity of life on our planet. According to one estimate, there currently exist around 8.7 million (give or take 1.3 million) species of eukaryotic organisms (Mora et al. 2011) – not even counting bacteria and other prokaryotes, which make up by far the largest part of the biomass. Other estimates put the total number of extant species anywhere between 2 million and 1 trillion, with a recent rough estimate being 1–6 billion species (Larsen et al. 2017). But life on Earth is not only extremely diverse when it comes to organismal diversity. Biologists also talk about biodiversity in terms of genetic diversity (e.g., the genetic variation within a particular species, such as the variation of alleles within the human genome, or the genetic variation that exists in a particular local population), ecosystem diversity (the variety of ecosystems found in a particular geographic region, or on the planet as a whole), and the variety of trophic groups in a particular region, as well as other types of diversity (Faith 2016).

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Chapter
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Philosophy of Science for Biologists , pp. 216 - 234
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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