What is the pricedore of providing distinct and proper names to organisms ?
Answers
You might notice above that the level of organism is highlighted, which is perfectly appropriate for this course! So, while biology has all of those levels of organization, we focus in this course mostly upon the individual organism. The big idea for today is to understand that when we look at the organisms, we also find that this single layer itself has many layers in another dimension. Rather than levels of organization, the organisms show incredible diversity that we distinguish in a process often called classification.
There are many ways that the organisms might be classified. Humans have traditionally grouped organisms into some major groupings and then subgroupings within each group. Humans love hierarchy, and so we naturally understand how to organize a complex mixture of organisms into groupings. This classification process could have placed the organisms into categories of usefulness...for example: those that provide food, those that provide fuel, those that provide clothing, those that perform work, those that provide pleasure, etc. But of course plants and mammals can supply food, and they can provide clothing. So this kind of classification would be defective in that it would put dissimilar organisms into the same groups...and similar organisms into different groups. So classification by usefulness would be unnatural. Obviously something less practical but more natural was needed to be biologically significant.