the.com/systematics
The science of naming life while constantly admitting you named it wrong.
means The branch of biology concerned with classifying organisms and figuring out how they're related to one another through evolution.
from Built from the Greek 'systema' meaning an organized whole — the same root behind 'system' — plus the adjective-forming '-atikos'. The Greek word itself comes from 'syn-' (together) and 'histanai' (to set up or stand), so a 'system' was literally things 'set up together'. Carl Linnaeus helped cement the word's scientific sense in the 1700s with his 'Systema Naturae', the great attempt to set all of nature up together in one orderly scheme — an ambition the field has been politely revising ever since.
- not taxonomy
- taxonomy names things, systematics explains why they're related
- core tool
- phylogenetic trees, built from shared evolutionary ancestry
- constant revision
- new DNA data keeps reshuffling the family trees
- oldest flex
- Linnaeus started it in 1735, still arguing continues