Scientific Classification Quotes

In science, each new point of view calls forth a revolution in nomenclature.

No one has been a greater botanist or zoologist. No one has written more books, more correctly, more methodically, from personal experience. No one has more completely changed a whole science and started a new epoch.

Evolution is not a fact. Evolution doesn't even qualify as a theory or as a hypothesis. It is a metaphysical research program, and it is not really testable science.

It is the genus that gives the characters, and not the characters that make the genus.

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

Unless one is a religious fundamentalist and believes that man was created in the image and likeness of God, it is foolish to believe that human beings are exempt from biological classification and the laws of evolution that apply to all other life forms.

Cuvier had even in his address & manner the character of a superior Man, much general power & eloquence in conversation & great variety of information on scientific as well as popular subjects. I should say of him that he is the most distinguished man of talents I have ever known on the continent: but I doubt if He be entitled to the appellation of a Man of Genius.

Conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev's Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were learning to unravel, was poetry.

When they were naming vitamins they must have thought there were going to be way more vitamins than there ended up being. OK let's name these: Vitamin A, Vitamin B... ok man slow down we've got a lot to cover here. B2, B3, B4, B5, B6, B12. Then they got to E and they were like 'We're pretty much done. We've got all those damn B's. This is embarrassing. Let's just skip to K and get the hell out of here.

One dictionary that I consulted remarks that "natural history" now commonly means the study of animals and plants "in a popular and superficial way," meaning popular and superficial to be equally damning adjectives. This is related to the current tendency in the biological sciences to label every subdivision of science with a name derived from the Greek. "Ecology" is erudite and profound; while "natural history" is popular and superficial. Though, as far as I can see, both labels apply to just about the same package of goods.

I could take you for a walk on the beach and I could point out just about any creature and give you their Latin names.

Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories; those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.

In science there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting.

A river is a river, independent of whether there are other rivers nearby. In science, we call things what they are based on their attributes, not what they're next to.

Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.

People know a planet when they see one, and I think that's a pretty darn good test, in fact, for planethood.

There's a lot of interesting words, nomenclatures, in science.

Most people are surprised when they hear my somber figures: we know of 2 million species of plants, animals and microorganisms, and we can give them each a scientific name and a diagnostic description. We know, perhaps generously, more than just a little bit of the anatomy in no more than 10 percent. We have done thorough studies in fewer than one-tenth of 1 percent. And the total number of species on Earth is unknown to the nearest order of magnitude.

I am a taxonomist, I work in the descriptive, narrative sciences of natural history. Unfortunately there is this status ordering from physics, the queen of the sciences up on top, down through a bunch of squishy subjects, ending up with sociology and psychology on the bottom. Palaeontologists are not much above that in their conventional ordering.

The kitchen clock is more convenient than sidereal time. We must use the popular category, as we do by the Linnæan classification, for convenience, and not as exact and final. Otherwise, we are presently confounded, when the best-settled traits of one race are claimed by some new ethnologist as precisely characteristic of the rival tribe.

I believe that natural history has lost much by the vague general treatment that is so common.

Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God's property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.

It is still open to question whether psychology is a natural science, or whether it can be regarded as a science at all.

A schism has taken place among the chemists. A particular set of them in France have undertaken to remodel all the terms of the science, and to give every substance a new name, the composition, and especially the termination of which, shall define the relation in which it stands to other substances of the same family.

Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost. The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately to defeat him, and the three major classifications are based on the method each object uses to achieve its purpose. As a general rule, any object capable of breaking down at the moment when it is most needed will do so.