| Abstract Detail
Concepts of Systematic Biology from Linnaeus to the Present (1707-2007): Three Hundred Years of Progressive Change Stevens, P. F. [1]. "Nature" between Linnaeus and Darwin. Linnaeus bewailed the lack of unique features for his natural groups, an absence effectively confirmed by Adanson, and in Linnaeus's genealogical-geographical map of the plant world, it was groups that were directly connected, characters are barely mentioned. Indeed, in most discussions and depictions of natural relationships in botany before 1859 groups that showed affinity were joined directly, a continuation of the grand tradition of the Great Chain of Being. With both A.-P. De Candolle and Macleay we can see rather different approaches to relating characters and groups, and in Macleay's influential system various kinds of relationships between groups were emphasized; although there is a distinctive arrangement of extant species, there are are also indirect connections between them. When Owen, building on the work of Macleay and others, distinguished between analogy and homology, affinity, which homology partly replaced, continued in use to describe relationships between groups which for the most part remained directly joined. A connection between homology, which usually referred to characters, and affinity, which referred to groups, was not immediately made. Yet both the Quinarian System and similar constructs and also some of the ideas of types made some naturalists turn away from thinking of relationships between groups as being direct, rather, species became connected indirectly either through fossils (mostly in zoology) or the abstractions that served as types.
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1 - University of Missouri st Louis, Biology, 1 University Boulevard, St Louis, MO, 63121, U. S. A.
Keywords:
homology
Analogy
Affinity
Chain of Being.
Presentation Type: Symposium or Colloquium Presentation
Session: SY16
Location: Stevens 1/Hilton
Date: Wednesday, July 11th, 2007
Time: 8:30 AM
Number: SY16002
Abstract ID:1503 |
