A PUZZLE

Textbook histories tell us that Charles Darwin sparked a scientific revolution with the publication of his Origin of Species in 1859. While this revolution is obvious in many biological disciplines, it is less so in biological taxonomy or systematics - the grouping and classification of organisms. After all, the approach most of us learn in school today was first developed by Linnaeus in 1735 - 124 years before the Origin. That being the case, where is the revolution? Systematist Ernst Mayr expresses this doubt: “As far as the methodology of classification is concerned, the Darwinian revolution had only minor impact” (Mayr 1982, 213). Mayr is right in that the Linnaean hierarchy predated but also survived the Darwinian revolution, and has remained in use today. But it would be wrong to conclude that the Darwinian revolution was irrelevant to classification.

My intention here is to sketch out Darwin’s influence on classification and the role classification played in his larger project. We shall see that despite the superficial similarity between pre- and post-Darwinian classification, Darwin’s influence has nonetheless been profound. He gave systematics a theoretical foundation and an operational method. Moreover, classification was important to Darwin’s project. His discussion of it in the Origin comes at the end, unifying and drawing together threads from important topics in earlier chapters – natural selection and divergence, comparative anatomy and morphology, and embryology and development.