UNAM
Revista Digital Universitaria
Revista Digital Universitaria ISSN: 1607 - 6079 | Publicación mensual | 1 de abril de 2014 vol.15, No.04

ABSTRACT

Systematics: historic path to understand biodiversity



Atilano Contreras Ramos


Systematics is the science of biological diversity. It studies species of all different biological groups from an agenda that includes discovery of species in nature, their description and formal proposal before the world scientific community, which includes they receive a scientific name. Systematists build and manage the holdings where this diversity of living forms is documented, the scientific collections. Species are classified, that is the position of each species and of their groups of related species is postulated in the great tree of life. Systematics is scientific in that it postulates falsifiable hypotheses about the existence of real entities of nature, the species, as well as hypotheses of evolutionary relatedness on the basis of homologous traits of different kind, morphological, physiological, ethological, molecular. Mexico is a megadiverse country with an extensive and intensive agenda in the exploration of biodiversity. Systematics provides a fundamental historical approach, which represents a basis to understand important biological processes such as adaptation to an environment, in the context of the phylogenetic relationships of species.



Keywords: Evolution, taxonomy, phylogeny, hypothesis, biological diversity.