#WORLD OF VARIETY HOURS PLUS#

My two daughters both studied biology at school and university and neither was taken on the thorough conducted So taxonomy-systematics-has in many circles been marginalized these past few decades. IndeedДЄ breed of molecular biologists has grown up who actually cannot tell the difference between a frog and a toad-or, indeed, when you boil it down, between a toad and a toadstool-because, quite simply, the differenceДoes not seem to matter to them. Many molecular biologists, therefore, simply do not care what kinds of cells they work on any one, they have tended to feel, can serve as a `model' for all the rest. In other words, molecular biology has increasinglyД®mphasized the underlying unity of life. Although there are large and significant differences in the operation of bacterial DNA on the one hand, and that of `eukaryotes' on the other (creatures like us, and fungi, and protozoansДЄnd oak trees, whose body cells contain distinct nuclei), DNA on the whole operates in remarkably consistent and similar ways across the whole spectrum of living things. Molecular biology is concerned primarily with the workings of DNA-the stuff of which genes are made: and genes shape There was also another kind of threat to the traditional craft of classification. Most spectacular of all was the rise of molecular biology, which-together with classical genetics and the rapidly unfolding ideas of evolution-has now provided biology with a core of ideas that isД«eginning to feel as robust and satisfying as the classical and quantum theory that lies at the heart of modern physics. Meanwhile, as the 1960s, 70s, and 80s unfolded, wonderful things were happening in other branches of biology: in ecology, animal behaviour, and evolutionary Taxonomy could sometimes seem less than riveting. In some courses (although not, I am pleased to say, in the ones that I was lucky enough to take), students who had been drawn to biology by the romance of it, theДesire to associate with their fellow creatures-or even, perhaps, to find a cure for cancer or to feed the world-found themselves counting the bristles on the legs of shrimps, to see if shrimp A was more like Taxonomy, though, used to have a down side. In short, an eye for classification is a constant reminder that nothing on this planet is as homely as it seems-there are several thousand million years of evolutionary drama behind

Once you grasped this principle you could see, in your mind's eye, how an earthworm and a bee-two unsurpassingly homely creatures-must have shared a common ancestor who lived, undoubtedly in the sea,ДЄt least 600 million years ago. The phylogenetic tree was thus a summary, in graphic form, of evolutionary history. Annelids thus emerged as metaphorical cousins of the arthropods, and echinoderms as metaphoricalД¬ousins of the vertebrates, although the annelid/arthropod lineage was only very distantly related to the echinoderm/vertebrate lineage. Classification, in short, wasД«ased on the phylogenetic tree, which, at least in general form and shape, resembles a genealogical tree of a human dynasty. True systematics, too, required that creatures should beД¬lassified not by arbitrary criteria but according to their actual phylogenetic relationships, in so far as these could be judged-where phylogeny implies `evolutionary history'.

This to me was what biology was for to admire and get to know what was out there. I loved this natural-historical foray among our fellow creatures. On evolutionary principles is commonly and properly called systematics. The general art, craft, and science of classification was and is called taxonomy and modern taxonomy based

#WORLD OF VARIETY HOURS PLUS#

Seaweeds fungi slime moulds plants, which then, as now, were assumed to include some seaweeds but not others, plus mosses, ferns, conifers, and flowering plants and the creatures loosely called bacteria, which in thoseДays nobody seemed to link satisfactorily to the rest and were sometimes (grotesquely) thrust in among the plants. (starfish, sea urchins, and the rest) vertebrates (backboned creatures, such as fish, dinosaurs, and ourselves) the confusing host of creatures from amoebae to diatoms that in those days were lumped together as `protists' So we worked steadily through all the known organisms group by group: the annelids (earthworms, leeches, and their like) the arthropods (crustaceans, insects, spiders, trilobites, and so on) echinoderms

We never stopped asking, `What are they? What's out there?'. It was also, of course, about processes-physiology, ecology, and above all evolution-butДЄt the core of all our enquiries were the organisms themselves. When I was at school and university in the 1950s and early 60s teachers and pupils took it to be self-evident that biology was about living creatures. A Survey and a Celebration of All the Creatures That Have Ever Lived

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