Explain why Aristotle's ststem of classifying animals is no longer used by biologists.?

Question

Use examples from the animal kingdom please.

Answer 1

Yay, for Carl Linnaeus (look him up)!

Answer 2

Hey,

Well Aristotle use morphology to group animals into genera. First he divided animals with blood and those without. In the blooded animals he had groups such as viviparous quadrupeds (mammals), oviparous quadrupeds (amphibians/reptiles), whales (which he didn't realise were mammals), birds, etc. In the non-blood group he had insects (which included all insects spiders and scorpions), and many more.

You see with the whales that they were miss-classified and should have been placed with the mammals as have the spiders and scorpions. By using modern day classification methods such as genetics, embryology, internal structure, etc you decrease the chance of being wrong.

When using morphology a trait can evolve twice (separately) and these animals will be classified as being close relatives. An example of this is the in the marsupials. Bandicoots have fused toes and polydont teeth but they evolved separately to other fused toed marsupials such as the kangaroo.

So basically morphology can be miss leading as a trait can evolve many times in separate areas. Also buy looking at many methods including morphology we can be much more specific with our groupings and even get them down to species differences with little to know morphological difference.

Hope that helps. You could write bout 10000 words on this topic.