ANTH 011 Lecture Notes - Lecture 31: Biological Anthropology, Brad Delson, Carl Linnaeus

• School: College of The Sequoias
• Department: Anthropology (ANTH)
• Course: ANTH 011
• Professor: Allen

Document Summary

The science of taxonomy that linnaeus devised forms the basis for the study of biological classification today. Animal or plant species are dynamic units, always changing in ways that may be too small or slow for us to see in comparing any 2 or 3 generations. Animals themselves determine the boundaries of species units by their willingness to mate or not with animals from similar species. The only natural category is the species; all others are the taxonomist"s way of making sense of the evolutionary past of clusters of related species. Today, the study of taxonomy is called systematics- branch of biology that describes patterns of organismal variation. Rely on the principle of homology- the notion that similar features in 2 related organisms look alike because of a shared evolutionary history. Some features are analogous- similar because of similar patterns of use rather than shared ancestry, ex: bird and bat wings are analogous.