Do you have an image in your mind of what a particular kind of animal or plant looks like? Most people do, and it seems to be a natural outcome of the way we humans think. We tend to classify things into hierarchies, lumping things into bigger and bigger, more inclusive groups. We recognize, for example, kit foxes, gray foxes, and red foxes, and then we group all of these species into a single larger class—that of foxes. Then we merge the foxes with the wolves and others to form the dog family which, in turn, groups with such as the cat and bear families to form the Order Carnivora.
And this works out pretty well, but it does tend to make us think of
each grouping as a homogeneous unit: THE kit fox, THE black bear. Perhaps because of
this, biologists frequently have underestimated the variability within species and have
thought—wrongly—that different looking animals meant different species. The result?
Thousands of species names that are synonyms, concealing, not revealing, the structure
of nature.
Contributor: Arthur H. Harris, Laboratory for Environmental Biology, Centennial Museum, University of Texas at El Paso.
Desert Diary is a joint production of the Centennial Museum and KTEP National Public Radio at the University of Texas at El Paso.