Abstract

At the dawn of the 21st century, evolutionary sciences have to take advantage of their accumulated knowledge in order to manage a better protection of environment and biodiversity. This also gives us an opportunity of controlling evolution and development of certain organisms in a way relatively favourable to human activities. This is particularly interesting in the Ž elds of medicine, microbiology, parasitology,biological control, genetic engineering, etc. However, we have recently discovered that the inventory of living organisms is far from completion. It is currently estimated that the 1.4 million living animals inventoried are probably less than 20% of the total whose estimate varies between 8 and 80 million. Our lack of knowledge about biodiversity restricts our ability to manage and protect our environment. For analysing biodiversity and for studying evolution, systematics is both a prelude and an achievement. It is a prelude because we cannot consider a Ž eld of study trustworthy if we are unable to identify precisely the taxa involved. We cannot propose either environmental impact assessments concerning an ecosystem if its components are unidentiŽ ed, or the developmentof a biotechnology,eventually leading to the deposit of a patent, based upon undeŽ ned biological materials. Systematics is an achievement because only a living systematics is able to represent the synthesis of our current knowledge about a given taxon, including the sum of the results produced by different Ž elds of study. In addition, the phylogenetichypotheses produced by modern systematics have proved to be powerful tools of investigationin the Ž elds of biogeography, phylogeography, ecology and evolution. Thus, scientiŽ c authoritiesmust consider how to maintain and increase our data and biological material banks

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