Mary P. Winsor

Taxonomy’s rightful place in history

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 | History of Science, Personalities | 5 Comments

A talk given last February 13 by paleontologist Niles Eldredge in Lisbon perfectly exemplified the general opinion regarding how little role Taxonomy played in the development of the modern Theory of Evolution. Already in a hurry after spending too much time talking about Darwin’s childhood, he reached a slide showing some barnacles and said “oh, by the way, Darwin spend some time on the taxonomy of barnacles, but this didn’t have any relevance to the development of his theory”, next slide. That was it. Taxonomy is but an unnecessary extra slide in the history of evolutionary biology. To be fair to Eldredge, his talk entitled “Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life” was not an specialized talk but rather was meant for the general public of all ages wondering what was all the excitement about Darwin this year.