Carolus Linneus : One of the many thinkers during the 1700s who tried to classify life.He was a trained physician who studied botany and became convinced that he could organize all of life into a single system, something that would help him understand God’s grand design of nature. His system was derived from Aristotle’s “Scala Naturae”, where the world was rated with God followed by angels and humans near the top of the chain of order. He published a book of his theories called Systema Naturae. In it he identified every species he knew of by naming them according to their Genus followed by their species. (Binomial Nomenclature). Before him there were complicated unorganized names thrown about by other naturalists of the time. He was the first to classify humans as Homo sapiens. And put chimpanzees and oranagans in the Homo genus. Also one of the problems naturalists faced was not knowing what to divide the living world according to. Linneus solved that making species the general unit for natural classification, taxonomy based on “unity of type”. A particular species would be recognized by whether or not they could interbreed and similarity in physical characteristics.
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