![]() In the Biblical Classification of Life (2000), Berndt’s mischaracterization of the “Modern Taxonomy” as grouping “life on the basis of physical similarity” (p. Perhaps it is this close correspondence of folk and formal scientific classifications that underlies some of the misconceptions about biological classification and explains why antievolution arguments often include attacks on homology, effectively exploiting the public’s confusion between scientific and folk systems of classification. ![]() Other folk systems do exist, however, that produce classifications that are very different from modern biology (for example, Berndt 2000 see review by Petto and Meyers 2004). The anthropological field known as "ethnobiology" investigates the various ways that organisms are classified in different cultures, and these "folk" categories often do bear a reasonably close relationship to formal taxonomic categories (for example, Begossi et al., 2008) when they rely primarily on observations from nature. This evolutionary classification is not the only way that humans classify organisms, of course. This knowledge is derived from the fact that all mammals share a number of derived biological characteristics that demonstrate their common ancestry from a specific branch of vertebrates. When we understand, for example, that a whale is a mammal and not a fish, we immediately know a tremendous amount about its biology: its reproductive, circulatory, and nervous systems its physiological temperature regulation its muscles, skin, bones, and so on. Biological classification is a mainstay of K–12 life science curricula.
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