Re: Why is it useful for a biologist to be able to classify living organisms?

Beth, It is useful to classify living organisms for a very simple reason, there are many millions of different species of organisms Any time you deal with many millions of different things it is useful to begin to group them so that you can make generalization about them and thus facilitate your understanding of the complexity. Compare this say to the population of the United States, there are over 250 million Americans, and the first thing we tend to do is classify them into various groups. There are very basic groupings, such as male and female that allow us to make some generalizations. There are also very specific groupings such as being a member of a union, a religious group etc that allow us to make generalizations. As you can imagine this allows you to gain a better understanding of the country, but it doesnot truly facilitate your understanding of the individual. The same is true in biology. We classify things into groups so that we can gain an understanding of the different groups of organisms, and then we look at the different individuals to understand them specifically. As you can imagine the generalizations that we make at the classification level never really totally fit with the individual, but it is a useful tool for comparing the individuals. Best Wishes, David Beck