Try as they might, evolutionists can't improve on the Linnaeus taxonomy

Almost every year is an anniversary of some significant event or other, but 2007 and 2008 are particularly special for biologists. This year we celebrate the 300th anniversary of the birth of Carl Linnaeus, and next year we celebrate the 250th anniversary of his ground breaking system for naming and catego­rizing plants and animals.

Prior to the time of Linnaeus, natu­ralists had a terrible time dealing with the creation's incredible biodiversity (variety of organisms). They even had prob­lems trying to discover what name, if any, had been applied to a given organ­ism. Linnaeus developed a system that eliminated the chaos. To this day, we have enjoyed the results of his efforts.

Unfortunately however, evolution­ary attitudes are driving us back toward uncertainty about names and groupings of organisms. One might suppose that a system which has served us so well for so long, would be retained. Unfortu­nately evolutionary objectives trump practicality.

A little history⤒🔗

Carl Linnaeus was born on May 23, 1707 to Swedish parents. His father was a Lutheran minister and his mother, only 18 when he was born, was the daughter of a minister. Carl grew up in a family that loved plants. Indeed his fa­ther was an amateur botanist and en­thusiastic gardener. Not surprisingly, the young Carl grew up not only a sincere Christian, but also with a great love for, and curiosity about nature. At age 25 he spent five months in Lapland studying the flora and fauna of the region. Three years later he went to the Netherlands to study medicine. During that time, Linnaeus had access to an impressive col­lection of tropical plants on the estate, near Haarlem, of George Clifford, a di­rector of the Dutch East India Company. These travels constituted Linnaeus' ex­posure to the diversity of organisms.

After that he returned to Sweden to teach, raise a family, to think and to write. For information on the diversity of organisms in distant regions of the globe, he relied on correspondence with other naturalists.

Linnaeus was curious and eager for descriptions of new organisms, particu­larly plants. He was a collector of infor­mation. He had a reason for this passion for information. He believed that God had created all organisms according to a plan, and if man could discern it, we would know something of God's logic in creating the living kinds.

Thus Linnaeus first set out to pro­pose categories of organisms which would be logical and natural (true groups), reflecting God's creative plan.

Secondly Linnaeus sought to find a user-friendly system for naming organisms and for retrieving those names.

Groups inside groups←⤒🔗

Linnaeus believed that an organ­ism which is assigned to a group, should share a set of characteristics with other organisms in the group. For example:

• Kingdom — Any plant can be grouped in the kingdom "plants". We expect then that like other plants, it is rooted and photosynthesizes in sun­light to manufacture food.
• Phylum — Similarly we can subdi­vide plants into divisions such as ferns, horsetails, club mosses, gym­nosperms (conifers) and flowering plants, among others.
• Class — We might then separate the flowering plants (which produce seeds in fruits) into classes of monocots and dicots. Monocots have flower parts usually in multiples of three, veins in leaves arranged in a parallel rather than in a branching pattern, and stems which lack any secondary (woody) thickening.
• Order — The class monocots can then be divided into orders such as Orchi­dales (orchids), Liliales (lilies), Graminales (grasses and grains ), and Palmales (palms) among others.
• Family — Among the Liliales are fam­ilies which include obvious lilies (Lili­aceae), the daffodils (Amaryllidaceae), iris (Iridaceae), and rushes (Jun­caceae) among others.
• Etc. — Among the family of obvious lilies we find lilies, crocus, trillium, asparagus and tulips, among others. Among the lilies we find such plants as Lilium philadelphicum var. andinum adopted in 1941 as the floral emblem of the province of Saskatchewan.

It was Linnaeus' achievement to de­clare that living creatures could be cate­gorized into groups which could then be separated into increasingly narrow collections of organisms. Within each grouping, at each level, the organisms exhibit features in common with others in the group and different from organ­isms in other groups.

Prior to Linnaeus, names of organ­isms included lengthy lists of descriptive adjectives. The names of all organisms, whatever their characteristics, were listed together in alphabetical order, rather than in categories with other or­ganisms of like characteristics. It is evi­dent that Linnaeus publication of the huge work Systema Naturae (System of Nature) in 1758 was truly a monumen­tal development in the history of biology. From this point forward, biologists had a common taxonomic framework (they had a common "filing system" to work with) and a practical retrieval system for names.

Why mess with it?←⤒🔗

The question thus arises, why mod­ern man would want to tamper with success?

Linnaeus' system was based on his understanding that organisms share sets of characteristics because they were designed by God to do so. Why is there so much variety? There is variety because God delights in variety on specific themes. Why can we detect a hierarchy of increasingly broad categories in which to place organisms? God designed His creation to be logical, understand­able and practical.

This understanding of the creation has, however, fallen into disfavor with many scientists during the past 150 years. Most biologists today believe that evolution, not God, produced the diver­sity that we see. These biologists now want our categorizing of organisms to reflect an evolutionary descent.

In the same way that cousins may resemble each other more than more distant relations, so biologists believe that organisms which exhibit similar features, probably are more recently descended from a common ancestor. In order to identify evolutionary lines of descent, biologists began to identify certain organisms as "primitive" and others as "advanced." For example, one-celled organisms would be considered primitive compared to organisms made up of many different kinds of cell. Such speculations however had little effect on the groupings of organisms since the categories were based on shape and other biological features that we can see.

New approach←⤒🔗

A new approach was proposed in 1950 and 1966 by a German entomolo­gist. He proposed that organisms be sep­arated into lines of descent based on only a few characteristics. One branch would represent those possessing a cer­tain feature, and the other branch would include the "have nots." Then these two branches would each be separated into two further branches based on posses­sion or lack of other characteristics. This system, called cladistics, sounded good in theory. However nature seldom coop­erates to fit this system. All too often a unique characteristic shows up in or­ganisms already separated into separate lines. In this case biologists assume the unique characteristic appeared twice by chance (convergence), or that the or­ganisms were formerly wrongly placed in separate lines of descent. This takes away from the logical character of the categorizing because key features can then be found in any group. Further­more, what was problematic when ob­servable characteristics like shape were used, has become dramatically worse now that DNA sequencing (order of the chemical components along the mole­cule) is preferentially used to indicate order of branching and thus relation­ships (categories).

Imagine the sentiments of a biolo­gist who thinks she knows the major groups of organisms, when she comes across a term like "ecdysozoans." Obvi­ously the term represents an important group of organisms but her recently published dictionary of biology includes no such term. A little research reveals that the term represents a new "super-clade" (category equivalent to Linnaeus' phylum).

Based on some similar DNA se­quences, the microscopic roundworms or nematodes are grouped with the arthropods. What??? Nematodes are tiny spindle shaped worms. Many are parasites of plants or animals. They have no distinct head, no special body cavity and often are made up of less than 1000 cells in total in their bodies. Compared to nematodes, arthropods are giants. Arthropods are creatures with an ex­oskeleton and jointed appendages (such as legs, wings, antennae). They include insects, crustaceans like crabs, spiders, millipedes and so on. Previously no one even remotely imagined any kind of re­lationship or grouping in common be­tween nematodes and arthropods. Well they do both discard their skin in order to grow. Snakes molt too but nobody wants to place them into the ecdyso­zoans.

It just doesn't make sense←⤒🔗

Prominent evolutionist Simon Con­way Morris declares that molecular data have revolutionized previous views on taxonomic groupings. There have been plenty of surprises. In other words the molecular data do not fit the categories based on shape and biology.

Of the ecdysozoans he declares: "in the ecdyso­zoans the previously unexpected link between nematodes and arthropods has not yet led to a more precisely resolved phylogeny (theory of relationships). Nor, of course, are we any better in­formed as to how anything like a nema­tode could have evolved from any other group of ecdysozoan."

Cell vol. 100, Jan.7/00 p. 8

The controversy on the placement of nematodes with arthro­pods continues to the present. Many or­ganisms, in similar fashion, are shuttled back and forth from one group to an­other as each new batch of molecular data is obtained.

The categories of organisms are thus subject to rapid changes of posi­tion and illogical groupings. This makes life difficult for people who work with biological materials. That list includes people in agriculture, horticulture, ecol­ogy and biodiversity research. In many cases even the Latin names of organisms are changed as they are shuttled from one category to another. An article on the topic in the November 2005 Land­scape Trades magazine was entitled "Rosa by any other name might not smell as sweet" (pp. 38-42).

More and more species←⤒🔗

The March 15/07 issue of Nature, with cover story on Linnaeus, also pointed out another major problem stemming from taxonomic categories based on DNA sequences. The article, entitled "The species and the specious" (pp. 250-253) deals with the issue of "cryptic" or hidden species. It turns out that populations of organisms that look the same, may yet be designated as sep­arate species if they differ in some part of their DNA sequence. The article re­counts the story of the meadow jumping mouse which is common all over the United States. Apparently in the foothills of Colorado and Wyoming however, there is a population of meadow jumping mouse with some DNA differences from those on the rest of the continent. Advocates want the foothills population declared a separate species. Since it occurs in a limited geo­graphical area, the mouse would then be eligible for protection under endangered species legislation. It so happens that the mouse habitat is on prime land for development.

Apparently, according to the journal Nature, we are seeing dramatic species inflation as biologists move to a new species concept based on evolution the­ory rather than biology. According to the biological definition, populations which interbreed in the wild, are from the same species. According to the evo­lution based definition, any diagnos­able difference merits separate species designation.

The problem of species inflation is widespread in plants too. And it is ap­parently playing havoc with endangered species legislation which was based on the old biological definition. Now, the smaller the area with a cryptic species, the smaller the population numbers will be and the more deserving the or­ganism will be of legal protection.

Conclusion←⤒🔗

Carl Linnaeus, for his part, was an intellectual giant. Based on his Christian faith and his love of nature, this man de­veloped a system of categorizing organ­isms which was logical and practical. His system has served us well for 250 years. In the past few years however, bi­ologists have done their best to turn Lin­naeus' system into something that is unstable (constantly changing), illogical and impossible to use for practical pur­poses. All this has been carried out in the name of Darwinian theory. May saner heads prevail so that we do not lose the benefits of Linnaeus' work. There is an ancient saying "Let us now praise famous men and the fathers that begat us." It seems appropriate in 2007 to praise the work of Carl Linnaeus. May we never forget why this work was so successful.