What are some of the advantages of evolutionary classification over Linnean classification?
What will be an ideal response?
Biologists now aim to classify living organisms based on evolutionary history, a strategy that has several advantages over Linnaean classification. First, where making judgments about the "shared similarities" of different organisms is inherently subjective, a classification based on evolutionary history is not at all subjective or arbitrary. Second, a classification system based on evolutionary history allows biologists to study more effectively how the features of organisms evolved. For example, knowing that birds and bats are distinct lineages with separate evolutionary histories allows us to infer that flight evolved independently in the two groups. Someone interested in studying the evolution of flight would proceed to ask very different questions than if, say, birds evolved from bats or vice versa.
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