The Need To Classify ' 
By Rocer L. BATTEN 
Department of Geology 
The University of Wisconsin 
[With 1 plate] 
One of mankind’s earliest intellectual endeavors was the attempt to 
gather together the seemingly overwhelming variety presented by 
nature into an orderly pattern. ‘The desire to classify—to impose 
order on chaos and then to form patterns out of this order on which 
to base ideas and conclusions—remains one of our strongest urges. 
This same desire is the basic stuff of science. 
The classification of living forms is a complex endeavor. It is also 
a constantly changing one. Even to this day, as new organisms are 
discovered, we are often faced with the need to revise past systems 
of classification—and we are never quite satisfied with the latest 
system. 
How do these classifications of life serve us? One of their most 
exciting uses is in unraveling the extremely tangled record of life’s 
evolution during the 500 million years for which we have records of 
organisms. 
In biology, the description of newly discovered organisms is not 
so common today as it was 50 years ago. In paleontology—the study 
of the remains of formerly living organisms—however, the job is 
far from complete. This is because it is not nearly so easy to obtain 
fossils as it is to collect living specimens: even after fossils are found 
in rock, it requires much painstaking preparation just to see the 
characters by which they can be classified. Almost daily in the field 
of paleontology, newly discovered fossil forms are being analyzed 
and described. 
It is easy to see that such discoveries require almost continuous 
change in our systems of classification. For it follows that, as more 
information accumulates, the “new” forms must be incorporated in 
the classification and our concepts of the relative positions and inter- 
relations between various groups of organisms must also change. For 
formal classification is, in essence, a rather artificial structure—a tool 
1Reprinted by permission from Natural History, 67, No. 3, March 1958. 
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