Senior Biology
Year 11
Task 2: Extended Response: Lumpers or Splitters

Task:

Part A: Student maintains a research journal (logbook) in which they record the progress of their research on taxonomy. The journal/logbook will provide a significant contribution to the assessment of this assignment. It should reflect the detail and depth of the student's thinking and their understanding of the biological ideas that underpin the topic. The journal/logbook mustinclude the prepared annotated bibliographies for articles provided during this topic.

Part B:The student writes an argumentative essay (800-1000 words) todiscuss positives and negatives of lumping and splitting for a range of examples before arguing that one way is generally better than the other.

Details of preparation time and conditions/requirements of assessment:

Individual study

1weeks’ notice

Time allowed: 3 weeks

Open access to resources

800-1000 words

The presentation of your research will be through a journal (logbook) and anargumentative essay. It should contain the following sections:

Part / Aspect / Word Guide / Due Dates – refer to your WRC
A / Journal/Logbook
Annotated bibliographies / Student’s entries
200 words each
B / Argumentative essay / 800-1000 words

At the end of this task, complete the ‘Declaration of ownership of work’ and send it, together with your journal and essayin the mail.

Evidence that supports authentication of your work may include:

  • annotated notes in response to issues that emerged during research (e.g. research journal)
  • teacher observation sheets
  • referencing and reference list

NOTE: Should there be any doubt of the report being your own work, you may be required to defend your work during an interview process.

Marking criteria and standards to help you in your task are given below.


DATE DISTRIBUTED: / 4/3/2013
DATE DUE: / Annotated Bibliographies and Journal 22/3/13
Essay - week starting 25/3/13
STUDENT NAME:
FAMILY NUMBER:
TEACHER:
SUBJECT: / Senior Biology
YEAR LEVEL: / 11
ASSESSMENT ITEM: / TASK 2 Extended Response:
Argumentative Essay: Lumpers or Splitters
RESULT: / Understanding Biology (UB)
A / B / C / D / E
Evaluating Biological Issues (EBI)
A / B / C / D / E
ASSESSMENT INFORMATION
TECHNIQUE: / Extended Response
TIME ALLOWED: / Three weeks
CONDITIONS/
REQUIREMENTS OF ASSESSMENT: / INDIVIDUAL STUDY
NO TEACHER INPUT
Access to annotated bibliographies and journal.

Please attach this sheet to the front of your Essay and Journal.

Year 11 Biology

Semester 1: Extended Response: Task 2: Lumpers and Splitters Annotated Bibliographies and essay

NAME: ______FAMILY NUMBER: ______DATE: ______

Year 11 Biology Marking Criteria: Part A – Journal

A / B / C / D / E
Understanding Biology / The student communicates their understanding by: / The student communicates their understanding by: / The student communicates their understanding by: / The student communicates their understanding by / The student
  • explaining ideas, concepts, principles and theories and describing interrelationships in taxonomy
/
  • defining and describing ideas, concepts, principles and theories, and identifying interrelationships in taxonomy
/
  • stating ideas and using terminology relevant to concepts and recalling interrelationships in taxonomy
/
  • states terminology and ideas relevant to concepts in taxonomy.

Evaluating biological issues / The student communicates by: / The student communicates by: / The student communicates by: / The student communicates by: / The student communicates by:
  • gathering information and data from a variety of sources
/
  • gathering and using biological information to make statements
/
  • using supplied information to make statements.

  • selecting relevant information and data to make plausible decisions and predictions with regards to lumping and splitting
/
  • recognising that lumping and splitting hasbiological implications.

Year 11 Biology

Semester 1: Extended Response: Task 2: Lumpers and Splitters Annotated Bibliographies and essay

NAME: ______FAMILY NUMBER: ______DATE: ______

Year 11 Biology Marking Criteria: Part B – Argumentative Essay

A / B / C / D / E
Understanding Biology / The student communicates their understanding by: / The student communicates their understanding by: / The student communicates their understanding by: / The student communicates their understanding by / The student
  • makinglinks between related ideas, concepts, principles and theories to reveal meaningful interrelationships in taxonomy
/
  • explaining ideas, concepts, principles and theories and describing interrelationships in taxonomy
/
  • defining and describing ideas, concepts, principles and theories, and identifying interrelationships in taxonomy
/
  • stating ideas and using terminology relevant to concepts and recalling interrelationships in taxonomy
/
  • states terminology and ideas relevant to concepts in taxonomy.

Evaluating biological issues / The student communicates by: / The student communicates by: / The student communicates by: / The student communicates by: / The student communicates by:
  • gathering, critically analysing and evaluating information and data from a variety of valid and reliable sources
/
  • gathering, analysing and evaluating information and data from a variety of valid and reliable sources
/
  • gathering information and data from a variety of sources
/
  • gathering and using biological information to make statements
/
  • using supplied information to make statements.

  • integrating the information and data to make justified and responsible decisions with regards to lumping and splitting
/
  • integrating the information and data to make supported decisions with regards to lumping and splitting
/
  • selecting relevant information and data to make plausible decisions and predictions with regards to lumping and splitting
/
  • recognising that lumping and splitting has biological implications.

OVERALL RESULT: Understanding Biology _____ Evaluating Biological Issues ______

Name: ______

Family No:______

Semester 1: Extended response Task2 Parts A & B: Lumpers or splitters

A note about plagiarism:

Plagiarism is stealing of intellectual property.

All work submitted must be your own. This assignment is not about reorganising already existing information, but rather about creating something new. Any help you receive in this assignment other than from your teacher must be acknowledged.

Declaration of ownership of work (This must be completed to gain credit for this assignment):

The work submitted is my own. No parts are copied or reworded. All references have been recorded in the bibliography of the task.

In addition to assistance from my teacher, I have also received advice from (insert person’s name and title), who gave advice about (insert a brief description on what they helped you with).

Your signature: ______Date:______

Please submit this form with your Journal.

Task details:

As you know, taxonomists classify living things. You are required to complete Unit 1 in preparation for the essay you’ll write. You will be asked to read several taxonomy articles ranging from classifying birds, to mushrooms to gum trees. Importantly you aredirected to read Jim Borrow’s article which was the stimulus for this task. The article Corymbia, corymbia … wherefore art thou corymbia, (U1T4L5) explains that taxonomists can themselves be classified as either “lumpers or splitters”:

  • ‘lumpers’ are taxonomists who like to have few groups with large numbers of species in them
  • ‘splitters’ like to have many groups with fewer species in them.

Part A: Journal/Logbook

You will need to maintain a research journal (logbook) in which you record the progress of your research. It will include:

  • the annotated bibliographic entry for each article you read during this topic
  • your own ideas that relate to the task.

Date each journal entry.

The journal will provide a significant contribution to the assessment of this assignment. It should reflect the detail and depth of your thinking and your understanding of the biological ideas that underpin your topic. If you need some cues to get you started, refer to ‘Keeping a Learning Log’. Remember to keep all this material together – you will use it to write your essay.

Refer to Annotated bibliography to refresh your memory about how to prepare an annotated bibliographic entry. Each entry should have a maximum of 200 words.

The other articles for which you will prepare annotated bibliographic entries are:

  • ‘The Eucalypt Page’ – This article provides a good introduction to the study of eucalypts and explains some of the terminology.
  • ‘Eucalypts: native Australians’ – Another basic introduction to the ‘splitter’ classification.
  • ‘Eucalypts but not Eucalyptus’ – This article provides an historical overview of eucalypt taxonomy.
  • ‘Corymbia, Corymbia … wherefore art thou Corymbia?’ – This article explains why the two approaches that the taxonomists can take identifies them as ‘fundamentalists or pragmatists’.

Part B:Essay

Write an argumentative essay (based on your research journal and annotated bibliographies) on the positives and negatives of lumping and splitting for a range of examples before arguing that one way is generally better than the other.

  • You must support one position or the other. Neither position is wrong. There are powerful arguments for both, as you would have discovered.
  • When you write your essay, you should supply detailed arguments to justify your position.
  • You need to demonstrate your understanding of biology and your ability to evaluate a biological issue.

Your essay must be 800 – 1000 words. But remember – it is the quality of your argument that will be judged, so it is in your interests to include only relevant details.

You can use the following to help you:

  • the articles provided with this task
  • your journal, including annotated bibliographies you’ve made prior to this exam
  • your knowledge of classification
  • your commonsense ideas about how people use classification for both practical and academic purposes

In doing this task, you might consider explaining:

  • How the current taxonomy system works.
  • How different are organisms within one group? What level of difference justifies forming another group?
  • Should we be trying to classify organisms anyway? Why/ why not.
  • Why there are alternate arguments about ways of classifying the same organisms.
  • The impossibility of ever creating a permanent universal system of classification.
  • Some examples of what you are explaining.
  • Why there are arguments about ways of classifying the same organisms.
  • Why do humans classify organisms anyway? Is it for the practical use of hobbyists, ecologists, foresters, forest rangers and the like? Is it to establish relationships and decipher the history of life?
  • How visible (and therefore practical) are the changes in characteristics between one grouping and the next?
  • How is the usefulness of classification affected by ‘lumping’ or ‘splitting’? Are there positives and negatives for each method? What are they? Make sure you illustrate your points with concrete examples!
  • Commonly 7 levels of classification are used if you take some version of kingdom into account. What if there were only 2 levels of classification such as: kingdom (animal & plant) and phylum? Or genus and species? Or kingdom and species? How about only 1 level like Vertebrates or invertebrates? Eukaryote and prokaryote? (you have covered all of these groups in lessons so far).
  • What are the implications of having more than 7 levels (such as when Eucalypts have sub genera or Angiosperms have sub-phyla of monocot/dicot)? Could there also be other sub phyla, sub classes, sub species? Where would different races of people or different breeds of dogs fit in with your opinion? Is there something you’d like to see added to or removed from our common classification system? Why?
  • Who could each method be useful for? (hobbyists, ecologists, foresters, forest rangers)
  • At this time, do you prefer lumping of splitting? Why?

Classification Conundrums

The hierarchical classification system now used by biologists originated with Aristotle and was arranged in its modern format by Carolus Linnaeus. The seven major categories of the hierarchy below the domain level—kingdom, phylum/division, class, order, family, genus, and species—are sometimes referred to as Linnaean categories.

Systematics involves naming organisms and categorizing them on the basis of their evolutionary relationships (that is, their phylogeny). As is true of any scientific discipline, systematic conclusions are only tentative. Whenever newer and more complete data on phylogeny are available, the systematic status of taxonomic groups will change. Why should anyone be surprised that a system developed at least a century before Darwin's time might be having problems? Both the techniques of data acquisition available to systematists and the procedures of their discipline have changed dramatically since even the 1950s, when Whittaker introduced the five-kingdom system that is now being challenged.

Why this is so important, and why it has such a dramatic effect on which classification scheme you learn, requires some knowledge of taxonomic philosophy. There are three currently available schools of taxonomy. Classical, or traditional (sometimes called evolutionary), taxonomy attempts to meld information on past evolutionary branching patterns with the degree of divergence of the considered taxonomic groups. Phenetic taxonomy is classification on the basis of morphological similarity. Cladistic (often called phylogenetic) taxonomy is based solely on what can be discerned of the past evolutionary branching patterns.

As the name implies, the traditional school was the dominant view of systematics for a long time. Currently, the cladistic school predominates. That this has consequences for the taxonomy and systematics of organisms can be illustrated by the classification of birds. Traditionalists have no problem with the vertebrate class Aves (birds), especially considering the novel features that birds evolved compared to most reptiles. Cladists, who are concerned only with branching patterns, recognize the birds as only one evolutionary lineage of dinosaurs and thus as unworthy of recognition as their own class.

Is it time to acknowledge that the goals of the science of systematics do not entirely correspond to the needs of an informed public (or of an Year 11 biology class)? In general, the goals of systematics are to have stability (that is, names that do not change over time), to demonstrate uniqueness (that is, one taxonomic category, one name), and to indicate relationships (named groups at a given taxonomic level should be closer relatives than are groups at other levels). These goals allow for maximum information retrieval capability. Traditionalists have long admitted the lack of correspondence between different taxonomic levels (consider two genera: the genus Solidago, goldenrods, has more than 100 species, whereas genus Pandion, the osprey, has only one species). Even allowing for extinctions over time, there can be little branching-sequence equivalence to these genera, although there may be an equivalent amount of divergence. As professional systematists place more significance on branching relationships, the Linnaean categories have less usefulness. However, perhaps it is no more reasonable to expect the general public to follow the currents in professional systematics, or to learn each new category or branching sequence that is uncovered, than it was to expect the general public to keep up with each twist and turn of biological nomenclature.

Given the current concerns about biodiversity and its loss, perhaps it is most reasonable to adopt a standardized taxonomy of common names—one based on reasonable and apparent properties of the organisms. This does not necessarily void the goals of the professionals, but it adds a goal of accessibility for the nonprofessional. It is not really a novel idea; it has had a long tradition in ornithology. Standardized common names can be reasonable for indicating relatedness, too (for example, woodpeckers or water snakes), and such names are more widely used and understood outside the profession. It would also allow for the reasonable consideration of, for example, the algae within the plant kingdom, with no apologies. What is a kingdom, indeed?

Audesirk, T, (2005) Biology Life on Earth 7th Edition Chaper 18: Systematics: Seeking order amidst dirversity <URL [Accessed: 26 November 2012]

Taxonomy, the science of naming and classifying organisms, is the original bioinformatics and a fundamental

basis for all biology. Yet over the past few decades, teaching and funding of taxonomy has declined. In 2002, taxonomy suddenly became fashionable again, and revolutionary approaches to taxonomy using DNA and Internet technology are now being contemplated. The new excitement about taxonomy is driven partly by advances in technology, and partly by newly perceived needs given the biodiversity crisis. To reform and build on what taxonomists have already accomplished, the biology community must now begin to seek consensus, and avoid fragmenting into vociferous sub-disciplines with multiple, competing aims.

Mallet, J, (2003) Taxonomy: renaissance or Tower of Babel? Trends in Ecology and Evolution Vol. 18 No.2 February 2003. <URL [Accessed: 26 November 2012]