16 May 2000 Taxonomy is one of the more important concepts in biology, and one that is actually not too hard to understand. This article presents some ideas about how it can be taught at a basic level.
Taxonomy is about the groups that different kinds of living organisms fall into.
The first problem is finding a name for these groups. The word group is both vague and confusing, it suggests an actual group of individual organisms. One term is systematic unit , which is not even a single word. Taxon is short and sweet. Maybe we should regularise the plural to taxons so that the irregular grammar does not distract from the discussion.