Taxonomy Quotes

• Taxonomy (the science of classification) is often undervalued as a glorified form of filing-with each species in its folder, like a stamp in its prescribed place in an album; but taxonomy is a fundamental and dynamic science, dedicated to exploring the causes of relationships and similarities among organisms. Classifications are theories about the basis of natural order, not dull catalogues compiled only to avoid chaos.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Order, Dull, Causes

  Stephen Jay Gould (1990). “Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History”, p.98, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeonholes.

  Alfred Kinsey

  Lgbt Pride, Lgbt Community, Mind

  Sexual Behavior in the Human Male ch. 21 (1948)

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• Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheeps and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white.

  Alfred Kinsey

  Two, White, Black

  Sexual Behavior in the Human Male ch. 21 (1948)

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• Taxonomy is described sometimes as a science and sometimes as an art, but really it’s a battleground.

  Bill Bryson

  Art, Sometimes, Battleground

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• The study of taxonomy in its broadest sense is probably the oldest branch of biology or natural history as well as the basis for all the other branches, since the first step in obtaining any knowledge of things about us is to discriminate between them and to learn to recognize them.

  Richard E. Blackwelder

  Knowledge, Science, Branches

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• A taxonomy of abilities, like a taxonomy anywhere else in science, is apt to strike a certain type of impatient student as a gratuitous orgy of pedantry. Doubtless, compulsions to intellectual tidiness express themselves prematurely at times, and excessively at others, but a good descriptive taxonomy, as Darwin found in developing his theory, and as Newton found in the work of Kepler, is the mother of laws and theories.

  Raymond Cattell

  Mother, Law, Intellectual

  "Intelligence: Its Structure, Growth and Action". Book by Raymond Cattell (p. 61), 1987.

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• The most important point of [Susan] Fiske's work is that it provides a taxonomy for our differing feelings about different Thems - sometimes fear, sometimes ridicule, sometimes contemptuous pity, sometimes savagery.

  Robert M. Sapolsky

  Feelings, Important, Different

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• Eventually you won't think of 'the Internet business.' You'll think of it more like news, weather, sports, but even that taxonomy isn't clear.

  Bill Gates

  Sports, Thinking, Weather

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• Genome sequencing has changed taxonomy.

  Richard Dawkins

  Changed, Sequencing, Genome

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• Bird taxonomy is a difficult field because of the severe anatomical constraints imposed by flight. There are only so many ways to design a bird capable, say, of catching insects in mid-air, with the result that birds of similar habitats tend to have very similar anatomies, whatever their ancestry. For example, American vultures look and behave much like Old World vultures, but biologists have come to realize that the former are related to storks, the latter to hawks, and that their resemblances result from their common lifestyle.

  Jared Diamond

  Air, Bird, Design

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• It felt—nearly twenty-five hundred years after Hippocrates had naively coined the overarching term karkinos—that modern oncology was hardly any more sophisticated in its taxonomy of cancer.

  Siddhartha Mukherjee

  Cancer, Years, Twenties

  Siddhartha Mukherjee (2011). “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer”, p.155, Simon and Schuster

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• Death of a Salesman' is a brilliant taxonomy of the spiritual atrophy of mid-twentieth-century white America.

  John Lahr

  Spiritual, White, America

  "Hard Sell" by John Lahr, www.newyorker.com. May 25, 2009.

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• We now have many of the answers that once eluded Darwin, thanks to two developments that he could not have imagined: continental drift and molecular taxonomy.

  Jerry A. Coyne

  Two, Development, Answers

  Jerry A. Coyne (2009). “Why Evolution Is True”, p.106, Penguin

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• [About a conference on Systematic Biology] Many interesting statements were made that apply directly to the work of taxonomists. In some cases the interest lay in the value of the suggestion and sometimes in the obvious need for rebuttal.

  Richard E. Blackwelder

  Science, Interesting, Systematic

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• I have worked really hard to defy categorization, to break down a taxonomy whenever it comes my way.

  Rick Moody

  Way, Breaking Down, Categorization

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• [In science any model depends on a pre-chosen taxonomy] a set of classifications into which we divide the enormous complexity of the real world... Land, labor, and capital are extremely heterogeneous aggregates, not much better than earth, air, fire, and water.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Real, Land, Fire

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• But the poetry side is what appeals more to me today. Metaphor, just absurd linkages and coming up with categories, labeling, taxonomy, and I'd say that I do have some tools left. There are days I can't make a sentence out of anything, and anything I make looks clunky to me. But I still have a general grasp of the cliché, of the generic sentence. And if I didn't have that, I'd be a blob of putty on the floor.

  Richard Meltzer

  Tools, Looks, Today

  Source: therumpus.net

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• We need to develop a better descriptive vocabulary for lying, a taxonomy, a way to distinguish intentional lies from unintentional ones, and a way to distinguish the lies that the liar himself believes in-a way to signal those lies that could more accurately be understood as dreams.

  Rivka Galchen

  Dream, Liars, Lying

  Rivka Galchen (2008). “Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel”, p.56, Macmillan

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• Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheeps and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behavior, the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex.

  Alfred Kinsey

  Sex, Reality, Two

  Sexual Behavior in the Human Male ch. 21 (1948)

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