EVOLUTION 7 How do we classify living organisms What are tax

(EVOLUTION)

7. How do we classify living organisms? What are taxa? How do they relate to clades?

8. Describe some of the “contributions” of prokaryotes to all of life on Earth.

9. Based on DNA sequence analysis (primarily of their small subunit rRNA genes) major clades of life have been proposed as the Bacteria, Euryarchaea, TACK (Archaea minus the Euryarchaea) and Eukarya.

            a. What traits do the Archaea (Euryarchaea and TACK) share with Bacteria? With Eukarya?

            b. Draw a simple tree to describe this new thinking.

10. Human are good long-distance runners. Why?

11. Give an example of a trait that evolved in humans and can best be explained by:

            a) Sexual selection –

            b) Group selection –

Solution

7).

Linnaeus introduced the binomial (= two name) nomenclature system. This includes the “genus” name followed by the “species” name. In this system, the initial letter in the genus name is capitalized, but the species name is not capitalized. The total name must be italicized.

For example, in Homo sapiens is the scientific name of the modern humans. In this, the Homo is the genus and the sapiens is the species. Observe that the name was italicized. Also, the “H” in homo is capitalized and the “s” in sapiens is not capitalized.

Taxonomy is a branch of biological science which include the depiction, recognition, nomenclature, and classification of living organisms. According to Linnaean system of classification, the animals are classified under different levels.

The each level or taxonomy rank has more animals than its subsequent rank, but all the animals share some common characteristics, clades represent the descendants of a common ancestor. The taxonomy ranks (groups) containing the most species to the group containing the fewest are,