8 



BIOCHEMICAL SYSTEMATICS 



"Lord, what a day!" 



Fig. 2-1. From the systematic point of view, the original caption 

 might have read, with equal humor, "You mean they're not all 

 dogs?" (Drawing by George Price, 1954, The New Yorker Maga- 

 zine, Inc.) 



order, and division have no specific meaning to most non-biologists 

 and frequently disputed meaning among biologists. The categories 

 may be regarded as highly arbitrary. Any attempt by man to 

 categorize natural variation must be arbitrary with respect to a 

 terminological system. This does not mean that the natural entities 

 which are being classified are, in themselves, arbitrary or subjective. 

 If Darwin's theory of evolution is accepted as the general mechanism 

 for the origin of extant taxa, it necessarily follows that the hierarchy 

 of formal categories erected by man do stand in certain positions 

 relative to each other. 



It is often argued that the biological categories, in that they 

 are classified by man, are completely subjective in nature. What is 

 often overlooked here is that the subjectiveness is in applying the 

 terminology; the objectiveness of the category under consideration, 

 from a biological point of view, is real. If the biological entity were 

 completely subjective, then, to use a far-fetched analogy, one might 

 well expect the dog-catcher to bring into the pound occasionally lions, 

 orang-outangs, pelicans, and on rare occasions, snakes (cf. Fig. 2-1). 



