Hierarchies in Biological Systematics

Igor Ya. Pavlinov was, until his retirement in 2018, leading researcher and the chief of the Mammal Division at the Zoological Museum at the Lomonosov Moscow State University. He is still affiliated with the Zoological Museum, where he is a curator of mammals. His DrS dissertation was Cladistic approach to phylogenetics and systemayics: Theoretical foundations of evolutionary cladistics (1997). His principal research interests are in theoretical systematics and phylogenetics, systematics of mammals (mainly rodents), and morphometrics. He is the author of several dozen books on natural history, including: Cladistic Analysis: Methodological Issues (1990), Evolution of Life (2001), Systematics of Mammals of the World (2003), Foundations of the Contemporary Phylogenetics (2005), Nomenclature in Systematics (2015) and its successor Taxonomic nomenclature — What’s in a name: Theory and History (2022), Foundations of Biological Systematics (2018) and its successor Biological Systematics: History and Theory (2021), Mammals of Russia: A Guide (2019), The Species Problem. A Conceptual History (2023), several books on particular orders and families of mammals, etc.

• Chapter 1. A historical consideration1.1. A brief overview1.2. The roots: folk systematics1.3. The Antique hierarchical systems1.4. Towards the deductive genus-species scheme1.5. The development of ranked taxonomic hierarchy1.6. Against taxonomic hierarchy and/oritsranking1.7. A brief history of meronomic hierarchiesChapter 2. Some philosophical considerations2.1. The hierarchical structure of cognitive situation2.2. The hierarchies of reduction cascades2.3. Some comments on the notions and definitions2.4. The pyramids of reasoning: logics, methodologies, methods2.5. The hierarchies of taxonomic theories2.6. On the objectivity and subjectivity of hierarchies and ranks2.7. The importance of being a system2.8. A few words about structuralismChapter 3. The hierarchies as they are3.1. Basic features of hierarchies3.2. More on onto-epistemic dualism of hierarchies3.3. The hierarchies topology3.4. Levelism3.5. Fuzzy hierarchies3.6. Hierarchization of classification systems3.7. To rank or not to rank: the contemporary debatesChapter 4. The hierarchies representations4.1. The text-like style4.2. The tree-like style4.3. The plane-like style4.4. From classifications to representations and back againChapter 5. Two important conceptual pyramids: species and homology5.1. The species problem5.2. The homology problemChapter 6. Taxonomic hierarchy and nomenclature6.1. Taxonomic theory and nomenclature6.2. The hierarchies of regulative nomenclature6.3. Rank-dependent nomenclature6.4. Rank-independent nomenclature