^ BIOCHEMICAL SYSTEMATICS 



Many non-taxonomists, including biologists and other scien- 

 tists, believe that the sole function of the taxonomist is to describe 

 and name species. While this is still an important function of taxon- 

 omy, it is not its beginning or end. Taxonomy, like other areas of 

 biology, has kept pace with the mainstream of biological progress. 



A well-trained worker in taxonomy today must have a broad 

 background in the fundamental concepts and basic working techniques 

 of a number of disciplines. He not only has to be familiar with the 

 special disciplines of his own field, but also should have some famiharity 

 with cytology, genetics, statistics, anatomy, and, it is hoped, bio- 

 chemistry. Without such breadth the worker is often confined to a 

 rather narrow avenue with much diminished perspective. If he is to 

 synthesize and integrate the data provided by classical methods and 

 augment this knowledge with new kinds of evidence he must be, as he 

 was in the beginning of the natural sciences, one of the better in- 

 formed and widest-read of all biologists. 



Taxonomic thought, as indicated in more detail below, changed 

 radically with the advent of Darwinism. Taxonomists not only have 

 incorporated various new morphological approaches (for example, 

 embryology and palynology), but also have accepted enthusiastically 

 the contributions from genetics and cytology. In the present text we 

 are attempting to inform the interested taxonomic worker of some 

 present trends and developments in biological thinking which are or 

 may become relevant to taxonomy. 



Certain biologists attempt to discredit taxonomy as a "clas- 

 sical" or dead field. This is unfortunate since taxonomy offers a con- 

 ceptual approach to biology at the organismal level such as chemistry 

 offers at the molecular level. Both taxonomy and chemistry are uni- 

 fying fields. The former, based on evolutionary principles, provides a 

 framework to account for morphological variation and its mecha- 

 nisms at the organismal and populational level, while classical and 

 theoretical chemistry provide a systematic framework to describe and 

 in part comprehend variations in the organization of elementary 

 particles. 



While the term taxonomy has long been used to cover sys- 

 tematic work in the inclusive sense, more recently a number of new 

 approaches has occasioned the advent of new names, such as sys- 

 tematics,! biosystematics, neosystematics, and so on. Regardless of 



1 Simpson (1961) defines systematics as "the scientific study of the kinds and 

 diversity of organisms and of any and all relationships among them," while taxonomy is 

 defined as "the theoretical study of classification, including its bases, principles, procedures, 

 and rules." In the present text we have used the terms interchangeably and in the inclusive 

 sense. 



