Biology book recommendations redux: taxonomy and/or cladistics

Cafe Society
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Your friendly neighborhood biology novice here, again asking for book suggestions after the great ones I got last time. I’m willing to read pretty much anything good, but one thing I would like to know more about is the breadth of modern diversity and how it is all classified. I’m interested in both the theory of classification and, well, a book pretty much describing all taxa and geni etc.

I’m not a specialist, but I am taking a university minor and should be able to read most books on the topic.

In return, I’ll recommend my favourite fairly non-scientific biology book: “The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions” by David Quammen.

I remember <b>Darwin’s Finch</b> and <b>ultrafilter</b> helped me out last time. You guys still here?

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Ah, the hubris of not previewing.

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Ecologist and geographer checking in. I do species inventories for national parks. I’ll recommend a couple, if you don’t mind.

One author you should rush out and read posthaste is Edward O. Wilson. He has authored or co-authored a number of absolute masterpieces in the realm of biodiversity, including the eponymous Biodiversity, The Diversity of Life, and many others. He’ll give you an idea of the general diversity of classification.

As for the theory of taxonomy itself, this is a pretty good textbook. Lest ye think that Linnaean taxonomy is written in stone, however, you should be aware of books such as this, which presents problems with conventional taxonomy and proposes another system.

As far as a book describing all existing taxa, to my knowledge, such a thing does not exist. Someone may correct me on this, but my understanding is that, especially since DNA typing became standard, the science of taxonomy is one of the most dynamic fields of study on the planet, with species being reclassified, hopping genera, family, and even class with wild abandon as new genetic information is uncovered. Essentially, a book written describing the state of all known taxa would be obsolete in a year, tops. Then there’s the practical matter of the sheer number of taxa, and the rate of their discovery. 250,000 species of insect known, with hundreds more being added every year. Millions upon millions of species of bacteria, fungi, diatoms, etc. completely undescribed by science. It’s a huge, huge task, and we haven’t even begun to begin to scratch the surface yet.

If you want good books about specific taxa, well, they’re in a constant state of panic and flux, but there are some decent ones out there. I could help a little if I knew what major taxa interested you in particular.

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Wilson. Writing that down.

I’ve just found myself coming across names of, not only organisms, but whole orders of things I’ve never even heard of before. I totally understand why no such thing exists, but I wanted to feel less ignorant about it all.

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Aha! I knew I knew that name from somewhere! He wrote “The theory of island biogeography” with MacArthur. He was actually interviewed in the Quammen book I mentioned.

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Well, if you want a very technical treatise on cladistic analysis, you might try taking a cautious stab at The Compleat Cladist: A Primer of Phylogenetic Procedures by Wiley, Siegel-Causey, Brooks, and Funk ( 1991, Special Bulletin no. 19 of The University of Kansas Museum of Natural History ). And that is the proper spelling of the title by the way ;).

But it’s not exactly light bedtime reading. More like a workbook for graduate students. E.O. Wilson will go down a lot easier :). And if you are interested in ants, he wrote the definitive volume on them. One should note in passing that while his work on ants and biodiversity aren’t particularly controversial, his work on sociobiology is a bit more so ( as with the field in general, though things may be coming to more of a consensus recently - I’m at least a decade out of date ).

If you’re interested in reading another old guard sort, there is always Ernst Mayr ( which when spoken aloud should be pronounced stridently with a faux teutonic accent :smiley: ), coiner of the long dominant, but much faded Biological Species Concept. The Growth of Biological Thought:Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (1982 ) examines just that, from the Mayrian world-view, with plenty of discussion of taxonomy. His Toward a New Philosophy of Biology: Observations of an Evolutionist ( 1988 ) covers a lot of ground on his concepts of speciation and diversity, including a nice little essay on the probability of extraterrestrial life. You may not necessarily agree with everything he writes ( I don’t :stuck_out_tongue: ), but he is thought-provoking and a decent writer on broad themes.

  • Tamerlane
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Oh, you know glancing at my bookshelves, another decent book I enjoyed on this general topic is Phylogeny, Ecology, and Behavior: A Research Program in Comparative Biology by Brooks and McLennan ( 1991, University of Chicago Press ). The go into phylogentic anaylsis in some detail with real world case studies and attempt to integrate ethology and ecology into the mix. Very interesting, I thought.

  • Tamerlane
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Phylogenetic Patterns and the Evolutionary Process, by Niles Eldredge (that name may or may not sound familiar; he and S. J. Gould came up with the theory of Punctuated Equilibrium) and Joel Cracraft, is a good intro to cladistics and systematics in general.

And The Compleat Cladist that Tamerlane mentioned is available online here (it’s a .pdf document).

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Correction: that link to The Compleat Cladist is only for the first chapter.

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A book you will find helpful; The Variety of Life, (Oxford Press 2000), by Colin Tudge.