NCERT Class 9 Science Diversity In Living Organisms

DIVERSITY IN LIVING ORGANISMS

Have you ever thought of the multitude of life-forms that surround us? Each organism is different from all others to a lesser or greater extent. For instance, consider yourself and a friend.

• Are you both of the same height?

• Does your nose look exactly like your friend’s nose?

• Is your hand-span the same as your friend’s?

However, if we were to compare ourselves and our friends with a monkey, what would we say? Obviously, we and our friends have a lot in common when we compare ourselves with a monkey. But suppose we were to add a cow to the comparison? We would then think that the monkey has a lot more in common with us than with the cow. In this activity, we had to decide which characteristics were more important in forming the desired category. Hence, we were also deciding which characteristics could be ignored.

Now, think of all the different forms in which life occurs on earth. On one hand we have microscopic bacteria of a few micrometre in size. While on the other hand we have blue whale and red wood trees of california of approximate sizes of 30 metres and 100 metres repectively. Some pine trees live for thousands of years while insects like mosquitoes die within a few days. Life also ranges from colourless or even transparent worms to brightly coloured birds and flowers.

This bewildering variety of life around us has evolved on the earth over millions of years. However, we do not have more than a tiny fraction of this time to try and understand all these living organisms, so we cannot look at them one by one. Instead, we look for similarities among the organisms, which will allow us to put them into different classes and then study different classes or groups as a whole.

In order to make relevant groups to study the variety of life forms, we need to decide which characteristics decide more fundamental differences among organisms. This would create the main broad groups of organisms. Within these groups, smaller subgroups will be decided by less important characteristics.

7.1 What is the Basis of Classification?

Attempts at classifying living things into groups have been made since time immemorial. Greek thinker Aristotle classified animals according to whether they lived on land, in water or in the air. This is a very simple way of looking at life, but misleading too. For example, animals that live in the sea include corals, whales, octopuses, starfish and sharks. We can immediately see that these are very different from each other in numerous ways. In fact, their habitat is the only point they share in common. This is no good as a way of making groups of organisms to study and think about.

We therefore need to decide which characteristics to be used as the basis for making the broadest divisions. Then we will have to pick the next set of characteristics for making sub-groups within these divisions. This process of classification within each group can then continue using new characteristics each time.

Before we go on, we need to think about what is meant by ‘characteristics’. When we are trying to classify a diverse group of organisms, we need to find ways in which some of them are similar enough to be thought of together. These ‘ways’, in fact, are details of appearance or behaviour, in other words, form and function.

What we mean by a characteristic is a particular form or a particular function. That most of us have five fingers on each hand is thus a characteristic. That we can run, but the banyan tree cannot, is also a characteristic.

Now, to understand how some characteristics are decided as being more fundamental than others, let us consider how a stone wall is built. The stones used will have different shapes and sizes. The stones at the top of the wall would not influence the choice of stones that come below them. On the other hand, the shapes and sizes of stones in the lowermost layer will decide the shape and size of the next layer and so on.

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