So, the act of naming is a matter of convenience – whether the
objects are pieces or furniture, bits of machinery, or animals we assign
them names because it makes life a heck of a lot easier for us. We, for
example, call a ‘fish’ with a cartilaginous skeleton and between five
and seven pairs of gills a “shark”. This allows us to tell another
person what animal we’re looking at or talking about. The use of a name
certainly helps, but not without problems. Telling someone that you went
diving with sharks while on holiday is kinda like saying you went out
for dinner with some primates; it’s not quite as specific as we might
want because there are lots of different ‘types’ of primates (and
sharks). Consequently, to make our meaning as clear as possible, objects
(be they animals, plants, bacteria, furniture, tools, etc.) are split
into as narrow groups as possible and each group is given a name.
So, for example, the group of ‘fish’ we call sharks gets further
split up into different types of sharks based largely on how they look
(their “morphology”), both internally (i.e. their skeleton, internal
organs etc.) and externally (i.e. fins, gills, skin, colour etc.). Large
groups are then split into smaller (i.e. more specific) ones and so on
down the line until you have a group containing all the animals
considered to be exactly the same in terms of the features we’re looking
at (these can be morphological, genetic, ecological, biochemical, even
behavioural): this is the species level (we’ll look at this in more
detail later). Humans, chimpanzees, great white sharks, blackbirds,
palmate newts and red squirrels are all examples of species. Some
taxonomists opt to take the splitting below the species level and group
animals into subspecies, infraspecies and forms (among others). Perhaps
the extreme of this splitting is found in the human species, where every
individual of the species is given his/her own name at birth. The problem is
that this gets very complicated very quickly as the list of viable names soon
runs out and leads to the confusing situation of several individuals
with the same name – think how confusing it can be if there are two or
three people in the office with the same name. Consequently, the branch
of Science known as “Taxonomy” (from the Greek word taxis, meaning
“order” or “rank” and –nomia, meaning “law”) is largely
concerned with the grouping of organisms down to the species level.