Taxonomic rank

Intro to Taxonomy - Introduction to Biology - 11.1

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• published: 08 Jul 2015
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Visit: http://academyofone.org Forum: http://www.academyofone.org/forums/ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/Academyofone1 Article: Royalty free music licensed by http://www.stockmusic.net Royalty free photos licensed by http://www.bigstockphoto.com Script: Welcome to unit eleven. In this unit we will talk about taxonomy and the taxonomy order. This is going to be an amazing unit. I just feel it in my ape related bones. What’s going on everybody! My name is Jack Jenkins and this is Academy of One. Today I’m talking about our introduction to taxonomy. So first off we should define the word. What is taxonomy? Well taxonomy is a branch of biology that deals with naming and classifying organisms based on shared characteristics. The field of taxonomy impacts biology a whole lot. For example, thanks to taxonomy we aren’t called humans in biology. That word is for those boring non scientist people like slash and gene Simmons. Us biologist call humans Homo sapiens. The first name, homo comes from our genus. The second name sapiens is our species. That’s the taxonomy way of saying names. First the genus then the species. For instance, the gray wolf is called canis lupus in taxonomy. We call this genus species name the scientific name. The scientific name of any life must follow a few conventions. The name must always has the first letter of the genus capitalized as well as have the full name in italics. That’s the convention taxonomy gave us and we must stick with. Taxonomy not only gives us the scientific names but it also gives us a hierarchy of categories. This hierarchy is called the taxonomic ranks. The ranks go from the largest group of organisms to smallest and most specific. The ranks are domain, kingdom, phylum or division, class, order, family, genus and species. Within the unit we will go over each of the ranks and discuss the various categories that are in there. The purpose of the taxonomic ranks has changed over the years. Before Darwin and his book on the origin of species taxonomic ranks was just a convection to name animals. Since the book, the ranks are now is based on phylogeny. Phylogeny is the study of the evolutionary history of an organism. See with taxonomic ranks we can see the history of organisms. For instance us humans are from primates which primates are a newer branch of mammals which is a new branch of the domain of Animalia. We can clearly see a historic line that not only goes more basic as it goes higher but also goes back in evolutionary time. We call these visible historic lines phylogenetic trees. Again, these trees can and do relate all life and the categories to each other. These trees are going to be vital when we get to our bioinformatics series. So how do we know that this evolutionary history is true? Well we have evidence that the evolutionary descent is true thanks to a few key fields. The first is anatomy. Systematists, people who study the diversification of life, can use the similarities of animal bone structure as well as other anatomical parts, to relate species with each other. The finger bones that we have relate us to dolphins and bats to form. These anatomical similarities form the taxonomic class of mammals. We can relate the living mammals to mammals that have lived in the past as well as animals further up the taxonomic rank. Eventually we can rank all these animals to plants and relate it to each other back to a common ancestor. This tree will take us all the way back to luca, the last universal common ancestor or the first living prokaryotic cell. This tree in particular will do that. Its starts off with luca which we know from the previous unit as the first prokaryotic cell that came from the Protocells. Then the prokaryotic cell formed a chlorobacteria which is the photosynthesis bacteria that created the ozone layer. It also split to form a bunch of other different bacteria until it formed the two new domains archaea and eukaryota. Well go into more detail in the next video.