SPECIES become extinct all too often. And now the very word itself is under
threat. Fredrik Pleijel of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and
Greg Rouse of the University of Sydney believe it is time that the notion of a
“species” went the way of the dodo.
The taxonomic system we use today was devised by Linnaeus over 200 years ago
and pigeon-holes organisms into classes, orders, families and so on, mainly
based on their morphology. If phylogeneticists get their way, these groupings
will all disappear. In a recently proposed system of phylogenetic nomenclature,
names relate only…
