Systematics, Taxonomy, and Phylogenetics

Abstract

Systematics includes all of the activities involved in the study of the diversity and origins of living and extinct organisms. This chapter focuses on: identification and comparison of specimens, species-level classification, phylogeny reconstruction, and classification above the level of the species. Taxonomy is the study of the principles and theory that inform the process of classification. It may seem counter-intuitive, but biologists have devised many different ways of defining species. Smith divides contemporary, nontypological, species concepts into process-related and pattern-related . The three main species concepts in the process category are the biological species concept , the evolutionary species concept , and the recognition species concept . The three main pattern-based species concepts are the phenetic species concept , the phylogenetic species concept , and the monophyletic species concept .