快猫短视频

SPECIES become extinct all too often. And now the very word itself is under
threat. Fredrik Pleijel of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and
Greg Rouse of the University of Sydney believe it is time that the notion of a
鈥渟pecies鈥� went the way of the dodo.

The taxonomic system we use today was devised by Linnaeus over 200 years ago
and pigeon-holes organisms into classes, orders, families and so on, mainly
based on their morphology. If phylogeneticists get their way, these groupings
will all disappear. In a recently proposed system of phylogenetic nomenclature,
names relate only to the branching points on the tree of life.

This new system still retains a privileged status for species, however. But
Pleijel and Rouse want to go a step further, and remove species along with the
other taxonomic ranks. In their system, 鈥渟pecies鈥� translate into the terminal
branching points of the evolutionary tree.

If species go, so will binomial names such as Homo sapiens. Pleijel and Rouse
argue this will avoid confusing situations common to the Linnaean system. For
instance, a single species, the European swimmer crab, has four alternative
binomial names. What we will be left with, they believe, is a more robust and
stable naming system, which better reflects our understanding of how organisms
are related.