Linnaeus and Cuvier essays

Linnaeus and Cuvier essays Carl Linnaeus was a scientific mastermind, still driven by his religious beliefs but intelligent enough not to let them stand in the way of what his findings were showing. Linnaeus was a botanist, a physician, and most importantly the founder of taxonomy. Throughout the course of his life he would change many aspects of the current classification system, and his dedicated work is still used today and considered the foundation of modern classification. Linnaeus realized that species of organisms were real entities, which could be grouped into higher categories of genera. He furthered this innovation by grouping genera into higher taxa that were also based on shared similarities. In his original system, Linnaeus grouped genera into orders, orders into classes, and classes into kingdoms, but later biologists added additional ranks to express additional levels of similarity. The need for a workable naming system at this time was made even greater by the huge number of plants and animals that were being brought back to Europe during world wide exploration travels. To simplify this, Linnaeus designed one Latin name to indicate the genus, and one as a shorthand name for the species. It is the combination of these two names that was to make up the binomial species name. Carl Linnaeus was the father of modern plant and animal classification. He did not invent binomials, but he was the first to use it consistently and provided a concise, useable survey of all the worlds plants and animals at that time. What has survived of his system is a method of hierarchical classification and binomial nomenclature. Linnaeus gave classification consistency and precision and his Systema Naturae (Tenth Edition 1978) has been accepted by international agreement as the official starting point for zoological nomenclature. His impact will be felt forever within the biological sciences. Georges Cuvier possessed one of the...