The Importance of Biological Taxonomy

Biological taxonomy is the scientific field dealing with the classification of living organisms. Non-biologists who give any thought to taxonomy, may think that the field is the dullest of the sciences. To the uninitiated, there is little difference between the life of a taxonomist and the life of a stamp collector. Nothing could be further from the truth. Taxonomy has become the grand unifying theory of the biological sciences. Efforts to sequence the genomes of prokaryotic, eukaryotic and viral species, thereby comparing the genomes of different classes of organisms, have revitalized the field of evolutionary taxonomy (phylogenetics). The analysis of normal and abnormal homologous genes in related classes of organisms have inspired new disease treatments targeted against specific molecules and pathways characteristic of species or classes or organisms. Students who do not understand the principles of modern taxonomy have little chance of perceiving the connections between medicine, genetics, pharmacology, or pathology, to say nothing of clinical microbiology. Here are two of the specific advantages of learning the taxonomy of infectious diseases. 1. As a method to drive down the complexity of medical microbiology Learning all the infectious diseases of humans is an impossible task. As the number of chronically ill and immune-compromised patients has increased, so have the number of opportunistic pathogens. As global transportation has become commonplace, the number o...
Source: Specified Life - Category: Information Technology Tags: classification data organization evolution taxonomy Source Type: blogs