How do scientists name species?

Each of us has our own name, which contains a lot of information, such as surnames, and perhaps parents' expectations. Some foreigners also add their ancestors' names before their children's names to commemorate their ancestors. With a name, we can be different from others in social life. Some people give themselves "pen names" or "stage names" out of hobbies or work needs. These names are full of personality, sometimes more reminiscent of the owner's characteristics.

So, how did the names of thousands of biological species in Qian Qian come from? How do people name them? As early as in ancient Greece, Aristotle, a great philosopher, put forward the definition of genus plus species difference to classify animals and plants simply, and later people also used his classification to name and classify animals and plants. However, with the progress of human civilization, especially the development of modern science, in the 16 and 17 centuries, scientists have continuously discovered a large number of animals and plants.

It's like there are only a few dozen books on your bookshelf. Although they are novels and textbooks, they are easier to find after classification. But if you have a large number of books, such as100000, there will be many problems if you continue to use the original rough and simple classification.

On the one hand, because the original classification is not detailed enough, there are a large number of books under a certain category, and there are great differences between them; On the other hand, because there are too many books in a certain category, finding a book is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Scientists at that time faced similar difficulties.

In order to solve this problem, scientists mainly use two classification methods to classify animals and plants. One is "natural classification", which classifies an organism according to its various organ shapes (such as root shape, calyx shape, petal shape, etc.). ); The other is "artificial classification", that is, only a few organs and sometimes even one organ are classified. Both methods have advantages and disadvantages.

Swedish naturalist Linnaeus is the founder of modern biological taxonomy. His main contribution to biological taxonomy is to establish a more perfect artificial taxonomy and binomial nomenclature. He divided living things into classes, orders, genera and species. At the same time, considering that the naming of creatures in academic circles was in a chaotic state at that time-for the same species, you have your name and I have my name-he proposed a binomial naming method including "generic name" and "species name", that is, any species is composed of two Latin names. This simple and effective naming method has been widely accepted by academic circles and produced good results.

The emergence and development of biological taxonomy make us realize how important it is to adopt scientific and reasonable methods in scientific research. I hope this will also be helpful to our study and thinking.