Systematics...at least at school!

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Fellow PaleoNetters,

Norm's last posting raised, I think, important questions about where
taxonomy in general fits in science-teaching at modern universities. Having
graduated a little over a year ago from a four-year zoology course at a
Scottish university, where the system is slightly different to the English,
I thought I might mention a couple of observations.

Thirty years ago, zoology, indeed biology in general, included a
considerable element of what was called 'systematics', which involved going
through the anatomy of series of specimens. These 'types' would be easily
available for actual dissections, for example, frogs, perch, turtles,
crayfish, doves, and so on. Of the students three or four years, the best
part of year one or two would be taken up by this sort of thing.

The 1960's changed much of this, with the switch from 'whole animal'
biology to individual systems (immunology, biochemistry, physiology,
ecology...). Another factor was the increased cost of dissections (animals
rarer or more costly, increased class sizes, and increased 'safety'
awareness) as well as a general distaste of 'needless' dissections.

So nowadays dissections are virtually absent, and a great deal fewer live
animals are kept in universities for teaching purposes. This has tended to
make systematics a 'text-book' course, and hence rather unpopular. A
corollary to this is that the younger generation of lecturers do not have a
broad based biological taxonomy that they can teach. In many universities,
and certainly in my experience, systematics has been relegated to the
fifty-something generation, or even actively retired staff! The young, and
often more dynamic, members of staff simply cannot teach systematic as a
general foundation course.

This has tended to set the subject on a vicious circle, as time progresses
it gets less fashionable, less popular and eventually less time is given
over to it. Instead, biological course cover systematics only in relation
to those 'pet species' used by members of staff for their own research
topics. So students only learn about animals from a narrow, 'consumers',
viewpoint. Instead of the diversity of animals and plants, they learn how
dozens of different systems work with or around one animal (e.g., tilapia,
salmon, or locusts...almost all 'commercially important').

In contrast, palaeontology still has an underlying theme of diversity of
animal groups, both through time and within clades. While the taxonomy is
debatable in some cases, it is often much more progressive than is taught
in zoology or botany, where interelationships are virtually ignored (I did
four years of general zoology and never once heard the word "cladistics"!).

Regards,

Neale.




>From  Neale Monks' PowerBook, at...

Department of Palaeontology, Natural History Museum, London, SW7 5BD
Internet: N.Monks@nhm.ac.uk, Telephone: 0171-938-9007

"...now Nature is having the last laugh. The freaky stuff is turning out to
be the mathematics of the natural world"

from 'Arcadia', by Tom Stoppard