Introduction

• Aristotle

  • Greek philosopher and scientist
  • first classification system based on a natural hierarchy (animals)
  • he grouped the types of creatures according to their similarities
• Andrea Caesalpino

  • De plantis libri XVI (1583)
  • Italian physician, philosopher and botanist
  • classified plants according to fruits and seeds
  • genus concept
• John Ray

  • Historia Plantarum (1686)
  • English naturalist
  • classification of plants based on morphology: monocot and dicot classes
  • biological definition of species
• Carolus Linnaeus

  • Species Plantarum (1753)
  • Systema Naturae (1758)
  • swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist
  • “father of modern taxonomy
  • classification by hierarchy
  • consistently used binomial nomenclature
• The Evolutionary Taxonomic Point of View

  • “new systematics”
  • influenced by theoretical genetics
• Methods and Principles of Systematics Zoology (1953)

  Ernst Mayr, Gordon Linsey, and Robert Usinger
• Principles of Animal Taxonomy

  • George Gaylord Simpson
  • interrelationships among groups of organisms
  • Emphasized the importance of the temporal perspective that could be gained in geology and the study of change in populations of fossils through time
• The Growth of Biological Thought (1982 ) - Ernst Mayr
• Origin of the species (1859 ) - Darwin
• The Phenetic Point of View

  • basis of overall similarity
  • Initially called as “Numerical Taxonomy”
  • David Hull 1970 - The desire to completely exclude evolutionary considerations from taxonomy because in the vast majority of cases phylogenies are unknown. Evolutionary systematists’ methods are not quantitative and sufficient
• Phenetic techniques

  • converting the numbers of character-state similarities and differences among all characters into a matrix of pairwise distances of the type
  • Both of these convert the original data into distances between pairs of taxa and form groups based on “overall similarity”: Unweighted Pairgroup Method of Analysis (UPGMA) and Neighbor Joining methods
• Phylogenetic Systematics (Will Hennig - 1966)
• Clade

  • Huxley used it to denote evolutionary lineage
• Cladistic relationships

  • expressing relative recency of common ancestry
• Phenetic relationships 


  arrangement by overall similarity based on all available characters without any weighing
• Cladistics


  applied to phylogenetic systematic studies of the type that espoused by Hennig
• Syncretist and gradist 


  refer to individuals whose approach to taxonomy reflects a combining of methodologies into what is often called evolutionary taxonomy
• phenogram - showing levels of clustering based on overall similarity

  
• Evolutionary tree - genealogical relationships and degree of divergence

  
• Cladogram - genealogical relationships on recency of common ancestry

  
• putative pattern of phylogenetic divergence

  • Evolutionary taxonomy and cladistics
  • phylogenetic relationship (shared descent)
  • progenitor-descendant relationship (serial descent)
  • degree of evolutionary change.
• What type of information is counted as evidence of grouping?

  Phenetics: Distance matrices

  Cladistics: Character state transformation

  Evolutionary Taxonomy: Character state transformation
• Grouping method

  Phenetics: overall similarity

  Cladistics: special similarity

  Evolutionary taxonomy: special similarity
• Terms

  • Apomorphy - an advanced character state; a group-defining feature
  • Autapomorphy - a derived feature (character state) unique to a taxon
  • Synapomorohy - shared derived character; a group defining trait
  • Plesiomorphy - a primitive character, not group defining
  • Symplesiomorphy - shared, primitive traits that define monophyletic groups only at higher levels
• Taxon

  • Basic unit of systematics
  • The term can be used to refer to a grouping of organisms at any level in the systematic hierarchy
• Operational Taxonomic Unit

  • any of the data sets under examination.
  • It is also used to classify groups of closely related individuals and arising out of phenetics.
  • Synonym for terminal taxon
• Character

  • feature that can be compared among taxa.
• Theoretical literature

  • Cladistics : Will Hennig Society - a journal of papers on methods
  • Systematic Biology 1991 : Society of Systematic Biologists - publishes articles on the classification of particular groups of organisms.
  • Taxon : International Association for Plant Taxonomists - articles of general interest to systematic botanists, including “official commentary” on botanical nomenclature
  • Systematic Botany : American Society of Plant Taxonomists (1952) important articles relevant to botany and zoology
• Theoretical Literature Textbooks

  • Phylogenetic Systematics - Willi Hennig (1966)
  • Taxonomy: A Text and Reference Book by Blackwelder (1967)
  • Phylogenetics: The Theory and Practice of Phylogenetic Systematics by by Wiley (1981)
  • Phylogeny Reconstruction in Paleontology by Schoch (1987)
  • Milestones in Systematics by Williams (2004)
  • Foundations of Phylogenetic Systematics by Wagele (2005)
  • Foundations of Systematics and Biogeography by Williams (2008)
• Theoretical Literature Abstracting and Indexing Sources

  • Zoological Record — First published in 1864
  • Biological Abstracts Since 1926 - database produced by Clarivate Analytics
  • Literature on Fossil Vertebrates: Oliver Perry Hay (1902) & Alfred Sherwood Romer (1962)
  • Bibliography of Fossil Vertebrates (BFV): Society of Vertebrate Paleontology
• Clarivate Analytics

  • Online indexing service
  • contains searchable databases on literature
• International Plant Names Index (IPNI)

  • database of the names and associated basic bibliographical details of seed plants, ferns and lycophytes
  • product of a collaboration between The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, The Harvard University Herbaria, and the Australian National Herbarium
• Internet resources

  • tolweb.org/tree/ : Tree of life web, Provides information about biodiversity, the character of different groups of organisms and their evolutionary history
  • treebase.org : Respiratory of phylogenetic information, phylogenetic data matrices and results
• Systematic collections

  Botany

  • Index Herbariorum : searchable database of the world’s herbaria, with a description of their collections, staff, and links to further information - http://sweetgum.nybg.org/science /ih/
  • Entry for a herbarium: physical location, URL, contents (e.g., number and type of specimens), founding date