EVOLUTION AND CLASSIFICATION

Based on these principles, we can work out the evolutionary relationships of the species we see around us. It is a sort of going backwards in time. We can do this by identifying hierarchies of characteristics between species. In order to understand this process, let us think back to our discussion on the classification of organisms in Class IX.

Similarities among organisms will allow us to group them and then study the groups. For this, which characteristics decide more fundamental differences among organisms, and which ones decide less basic differences? What is meant by ‘characteristics’, anyway? Characteristics are details of appearance or behaviour; in other words, a particular form or a particular function. That we have four limbs is thus a characteristic. That plants can do photosynthesis is also a characteristic.

Some basic characteristics will be shared by most organisms. The cell is the basic unit of life in all organisms. The characteristics in the next level of classification would be shared by most, but not all organisms. A basic characteristic of cell design that differs among different organisms is whether the cell has a nucleus. Bacterial cells do not, while the cells of most other organisms do. Among organisms with nucleated cells, which ones are unicellular and which ones multi-cellular? That property marks a very basic difference in body design, because of specialisation of cell types and tissues. Among multi-cellular organisms, whether they can undertake photosynthesis or not will provide the next level of classification. Among the multi-cellular organisms that cannot do photosynthesis, whether the skeleton is inside the body or around the body will mark another fundamental design difference. We can see that, even in these few questions that we have asked, a hierarchy is developing that allows us to make classification groups.

The more characteristics two species will have in common, the more closely they are related. And the more closely they are related, the more recently they will have had a common ancestor. An example will help. A brother and a sister are closely related. They have common ancestors in the first generation before them, namely, their parents. A girl and her first cousin are also related, but less than the girl and her brother. This is because cousins have common ancestors, their grandparents, in the second generation before them, not in the first one. We can now appreciate that classification of species is in fact a reflection of their evolutionary relationship.

We can thus build up small groups of species with recent common ancestors, then super-groups of these groups with more distant common ancestors, and so on. In theory, we can keep going backwards like this until we come to the notion of a single species at the very beginning of evolutionary time. If that is the case, then at some point in the history of the earth, non-living material must have given rise to life. There are many theories about how this might have happened. It would be interesting to come up with theories of our own!