This week marks the three hundredth birthday of Carl Linnaeus, father of modern biological taxonomy. Thanks to his organizational skills, supported later by Darwin's masterpiece "On the Origin of Species", humankind was better able to comprehend life's profound inter relatedness.
Linnaeus's original seven ranks of life has become a far more complex "Tree of Life" today as a result of DNA analysis, burgeoning into a massive weave of bushy lineages. Even if eventually, his ranking system gives way to another type of ranking system that increasingly utilizes evolutionary DNA relatedness for organizing life, Carl Linnaeus and his contribution to science will be celebrated through the ages as one of the greatest biological achievements in history.
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