Who invented biological nomenclature

When Linnaeus was first naming organisms, Latin was the language of science. In fact, Linnaeus was said to speak Latin as early as he learned to speak Swedish. Highly educated people of the period could all read and write in Latin which enabled them to share scientific information, regardless of whether their native tongue was Swedish, French, English, German, or any other European language of the time.

When he was only 28, Linnaeus wrote Systema Naturae or the System of Nature, a fundamental work of biology which introduced and used his binomial nomenclature throughout the book. In one section, he focused on the importance of the sexual parts of plants when classifying them. But Linnaeus got the last laugh; he named a very small weed after him. In fact, this is one of the last tasks in the exercise, and can be seen as a housekeeping exercise, albeit an important one. The taxonomist has the task of discovering species, through surveys and inventories, followed by investigating their features, inside and out, from the whole body to the gene.

Once a decision has been made about the uniqueness of a species or higher group or taxon , and that it warrants a name of its own, its position within the Tree of Life must be decided that is, its phylogeny. Today, there are about 2 million described species of organisms. Yet, scientists estimate there are almost 10 million that probably exist in nature.

Taxonomy is essentially a comparative science. It is not driven by experiments but is concerned with examining and analysing the same or like features across multiple species. Although some scientists outside the discipline see it as descriptive and anachronistic, it is in fact one of the most adaptive of fields, and is data-hungry like few others. Taxonomists quickly adopted the techniques and findings of the molecular revolution, beginning from the s onwards, as a new source of data for reconstructing relationships and evolutionary history.

Despite the earlier, unbridled, enthusiasm expressed for genetic classifications, it is today seen as another line of evidence, but not a panacea or replacing comparative anatomy. Taxonomists today face a daunting task at a time when species are being lost at an alarming rate and our knowledge of life on Earth is still cursory.

These differences gave him a good delineation between groups, but the choice was not related to any obvious "natural" function of the plant, flower or flower parts. His major groupings in the hierarchy of groups were, the kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species; seven levels of groups within groups.

This was arbitrary, and more levels have been added over the years since the time of Linnaeus. But, no matter how many levels are involved, finally only one form of an organism occupies the last group at the last level. After that there is no point in making more levels. Linnaeus followed the practice, started by Aristotle, of naming each unique form of an organism by it's genus name followed by a differentia phrase.

As today, the genus defined the second lowest group and was general a way of describing the set for example 'canines'. The differentia phrase added more information and said what made that particular organism special. For example 'canine' that 'lives in woods'. A genus is a rank in the classification system that is generally below the family and above the species level. It is comprised of species with common attributes. These attributes may be based on structural similarities or on phylogeny.

The second part of the binomial name is the specific name. The second name the specific name or the specific epithet sets a particular species apart from the rest of the species within the genus. Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy and methods of classification, was the one who formalized the binomial nomenclature as the modern system of naming organisms. He designed the system so as to differentiate species from one to the other. In his book, Systema Naturae , he described and classified thousands of species of plants and animals.

Soon, he had to track his classifications and to do that he came up with a concise naming system leading to the several binomial labels of species that he consistently used in his work, and eventually were applied and popularized in the scientific community.

Although Carl Linnaeus was credited for the modern two-term naming system, his work was largely influenced by that of Gaspard Bauhin, together with his brother, Johann Bauhin. The Bauhin brothers were using the binomial nomenclature almost years earlier.

Many of the generic names introduced by them were adopted by Linnaeus. Binomial nomenclature proved to be essential in the scientific community. Through this system, taxonomists from all around the world can identify a species in unison. Unlike the common names that can differ from one language to another, a scientific name proved to be more consistent. Not only will scientists and taxonomists evade inconsistency issues but they can also have an idea of the genus through which a species belongs, and therefore, have an idea of the attributes that members of the genus share.