Diversity in Living Organisms

                                                             

Hello again Homo sapiens!!!

One of the chapters I learned in class 10 during my senior secondary school years was ‘Diversity in Living Organisms.’ It talked about the classification of the large number of flora and fauna all around us so that they become easier to study and understand.

 We studied about primitive structures, new structures, general patterns shown by some organisms and similarities shown by them and how the greater the number of similarities shown by a group of organisms, the lower such organisms would be placed in the overall hierarchy, with the basic life forms starting on the top. I particularly found the topic interesting because of two reasons:

1 1)     I got to learn fantastic names like Synchiropus Splendidus…Scoliodon…Hippocampus…       Caulophyryne Jordani… and many more and I felt really happy speaking them out. It made me look  sophisticated and of the kind of erudite, even though I didn’t know anything about the organisms in   detail… Just the general characteristics…

   2)   I was able to see how classification and systematisation is done to be able to rigorously break down a seemingly confusing world into simple groups that enabled us to look at diversity around us from a new perspective altogether.

I would always speak the names to myself whenever I was free, walking around, brushing my teeth or getting ready for school, and would always jump around when I could pronounce them well!!!! I also looked up the scientific names just for fun, for anything I would see around me, from tomatoes to beetroot to even chicken and prawns!

Simultaneously… I was studying a chapter on “Race and Ethnicity” in my Political Science class and I observed the different types of stereotypes in the world and how they impacted people all around…caste…communalism and how gender, religion and castes impact politics. I also observed many struggles like the “Anti-Apartheid Movement” in South Africa and how certain groups of people in my country, India, continue to be labelled as “Dalits” or “Untouchables” even after the Constitution legally abolished untouchability in every form!

I particularly liked a picture illustrated in my NCERT textbook which showed the state of Dalits in our country in the form of a poem, “ Hidden Apartheid... Yes You Have Made The Mistake.”

On seeing these illustrations, I plunged deep in thought and began to connect the dots…

I noticed that I studied something really similar in Biology… The classification of living organisms based on their features… their nature. I felt a little uneasy as I read about several protests in newspapers on the plight of untouchables.

But it did seem pretty obvious that since science is systematic… everyone is taught the same thing and is forced to believe that the method illustrated is the best way to do a task, and since in a democratic society people have the freedom to think what they wish to think…they try to develop their own perception of the world around them…

Studying political science and looking at how these instances of gender and race stereotypes affect politics and many a times leads to political instability, makes me wonder about why such stereotypes even exist in the first place and my string of thought got me to conclude that most probably we have it in our nature to differentiate and classify things around us…differentiate the stars that twinkle from the planets that don’t… differentiate the red giant from a neutron star… a “Pteridophyte” from a “Bryophyllum” and the list goes on…

That seems to be the main reason behind classification because it makes the task of perceiving the world pretty much easier and systematic as exemplified in the NCERT Textbook for Science Class 9 Chapter 7

“In order to make relevant groups to study the variety of life forms, we need to decide which characteristics decide more fundamental differences among organisms. This would create the main broad groups of organisms. Within these groups, smaller subgroups will be decided by less important characteristics”

“Before we go on, we need to think about what is meant by ‘characteristics’. When we are trying to classify a diverse group of organisms, we need to find ways in which some of them are similar enough to be thought of together. These ‘ways’, in fact, are details of appearance or behaviour, in other words, form and function.”

These help us understand the very philosophy behind classification of living organisms and no wonder can help explain how we differentiate between groups of people...

So…in the living world, we end up differentiating a bacterium from a fungus based on Linnaeus’s system…and… In the social world, we end up differentiating groups of people from each other based on their caste, creed and occupation…

Humans appear to be analytical machines and they always look for patterns in daily life to be able to understand and predict phenomena around them…

Consequently, when everyone develops their own theories, conflicts are bound to take place and these conflicts draw barriers between different groups of people…

So based on my experience with “classification” as taken up in my biology and political science class, I came to form a perception of our social world that consists of people as unique points aggregating themselves into specific clusters by forces driven by the need to classify and group and divide, thereby creating different cultures and different traditions and fairly unwanted stereotypes which have become such an integral part of the system as a whole…

Finally, there is a video on Youtube that highlights a special characteristic in our brain that helps in pattern recognition...

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