Transcript Chapter 14

The Living World
Fourth Edition
GEORGE B. JOHNSON
14
How We Name
Living Things
PowerPoint® Lectures prepared by Johnny El-Rady
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14.1 The Invention of the
Linnaean System
To name organisms, biologists use a multilevel
grouping of individuals called classification
Organisms were first classified more than 2,000
years ago by Aristotle
Living things were either plants or animals
Later groups started to be formed and referred to as
genera (singular genus)
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The classification system of the Middle Ages was
known as the polynomial system
Polynomials were a string of Latin words or
phrases consisting of up to 12 or more words
This system was cumbersome and confusing
In the 1750s, the Swedish biologist Carolus Linnaeus
developed the binomial system
Binomials are two-part names
They have become our standard way of
designating species
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Fig. 14.1 How Linnaeus named two species of oaks
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14.2 Species Names
A group of organisms at a particular level in a
classification system is called a taxon (plural, taxa)
Taxonomy is the branch of biology that identifies
and names organisms
Organisms are named using Latin and in such a
way that no two have the same name
Using common names can be misleading
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Fig. 14.2 Common names make poor labels
Corn
Bears
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Robins
14.2 Species Names
By convention, the binomial name consists
Genus
The first word and is always capitalized
Epithet
The second word which refers to the species
and is not capitalized
The two words are written in italics
Together, they form the scientific name
Example: Apis mellifera The honeybee
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14.3 Higher Categories
Taxonomists use a hierarchical system to classify
organisms
Information
gets more
and more
general
Species
Genus
Family
Order
Class
Phylum
Kingdom
spaghetti
green
for
over
came
Philip
King
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Fig. 14.3
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14.4 What Is a Species?
John Ray (about 1700)
A species is a group of individuals that can breed with
one another and produce fertile offspring
Sterile
Fig. 14.4
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14.4 What Is a Species?
Ernst Mayr (1940s)
Proposed the biological species concept
Species are groups that are reproductivelyisolated
This concept works well for animals, but poorly
for other organisms
Problems
Assumes regular outcrossing
Assumes strong reproductive barriers
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14.4 What Is a Species?
Since the time of Linnaeus, about 1.5 million species
have been named
However, scientists estimate that at least 10 million
species exist
At least two-thirds of these occur in the tropics
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14.5 How to Build a Family Tree
Taxonomy also enables us to glimpse the
evolutionary history of life on earth
The evolutionary history of an organism and its
relationship to other species is called phylogeny
The reconstruction and study of phylogenetic trees
is called systematics
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14.5 How to Build a Family Tree
A clade is a group of organisms related by descent
Cladistics is the construction of phylogeny based
on similarities derived from a common ancestor
Examination of these derived characters allows
the construction of a branching cladogram
Cladograms are not true family trees
They convey comparative relationship information
Each cladogram must contain an outgroup to
which the ingroup is compared
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Fig. 14.5 A cladogram of vertebrate animals
Ingroup
Outgroup
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14.5 How to Build a Family Tree
Modern cladistics attempts to assign extra weight to
the evolutionary significance of key characters
Weighting characters lies at the heart of traditional
taxonomy
Phylogenies are constructed based on a large amount of
information about the organism gathered over the years
To construct their trees traditional taxonomists use both
ancestral and derived characters
Cladists use only derived characters
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Fig. 14.6 Two ways to classify terrestrial vertebrates
Birds have their
own Class
Birds are lumped
with reptiles
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14.5 How to Build a Family Tree
So which approach is better?
Traditional taxonomy, when a lot of information is
available to guide character weighting
Cladistics, when little information is available about
how the character affects the life of the organism
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Fig. 14.7 The cat family tree
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Fig. 14.7 The cat family tree
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14.6 The Kingdoms of Life
The designation of kingdoms has changed over the
years
Originally there were only two kingdoms
As more information about organisms was
obtained, the number of kingdoms increased!
Indeed, a taxonomic level higher than kingdom
has been recognized
Domain
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14.6 The Kingdoms of Life
Fig. 14.8 Different approaches to classifying living organisms
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Fig. 14.9 A tree of life
More closely related to each other
than either is to bacteria
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14.7 Domain Archaea
Consists of only one kingdom, the Archaebacteria
Archaebacteria inhabit some of the most extreme
environments on earth
They share certain key characteristics
Cell walls lacking peptidoglycan
Unusual lipids and unique rRNA sequences
Some archaebacterial genes possess introns
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Archaebacteria are grouped into three general
categories
Methanogens
Obtain energy by using hydrogen gas to reduce carbon
dioxide to methane gas
Extremophiles
Grow under extreme conditions
Thermophiles (heat)
Halophiles (salt)
pH-tolerant
Pressure-tolerant
Nonextreme archaebacteria
Grow in the same environments as bacteria do
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14.8 Domain Bacteria
Consists of only one kingdom, Bacteria
Bacteria are the most abundant organisms on earth
They play critical roles throughout the biosphere
Most taxonomists recognize 12-15 major groups
Bacteria are as different from archaebacteria as
they are from eukaryotes
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14.9 Domain Eukarya
Appeared about 1.5 billion years ago
Consists of four kingdoms
Animalia
Plantae
Fungi
Well defined evolutionary groups
Largely muticellular
Protista
Very diverse
Unicellular
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14.9 Domain Eukarya
The hallmark of eukaryotes is complex cellular
organization
This is highlighted by the presence of organelles
Mitochondria and chloroplasts most likely entered
early eukaryotic cells by endosymbiosis
Mitochondria are descendants of purple bacteria
Chloroplasts are descendants of cyanobacteria
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Fig. 14.10 Diagram of the evolutionary relationship among the six kingdoms
Symbiotic
events
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Interestingly, other types of photosynthetic protists
are endosymbionts of some eukaryotic organisms
Zooxanthellae algae
Fig. 14.11
Coral animal
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