by Harry F. Sanders, III on January 22, 2019

While God built certain classifications into the creation, man has named animals since the Garden of Eden. One of Adam’s first jobs was to classify the animals. “Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him.”1 Adam was the world’s first taxonomist. He spent part of the sixth day naming the birds and the beasts. While this was a much easier job then than it would be today since no variation had occurred yet, it still would have taken him perhaps a few hours to name the kinds.

Throughout history, man has followed Adam’s example and attempted to classify the world around him into groups. One of the first recorded to do so was the Greek philosopher and naturalist Aristotle. Aristotle grouped living things into plants and animals, with several subgroupings. He wrote several works on animals that included a discussion of their history2. Aristotle’s classification system, as rough as it was, like many of his other ideas, persisted well into the next millennium.

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