Summary
Taxonomy and systematics, which clarify organization among organisms by analysis of relationships, classification, and naming, ironically themselves require clarification of these parameters. The following are concerns: circumscription of research area; relationship with other biological sciences—whether overlapping or not, and whether hierarchical or not; subdisciplinary classification; and nomenclatural analysis of the disciplinary titles: taxonomy, systematics, biosystematics, experimental taxonomy, genecology, and population genetics. Taxonomy and systematics, and their internal subdivisions, may be conceived variously in their relationships to each other and to other sciences. All such systematizations suffer from the same problem as does biological classification: complex, overlapping, and indeed evolving relationships are distorted for the purpose of simplification. Systematic disciplinary titles are problematical, including G. G. Simpson's widely employed definitions of systematics and taxonomy. Systematics and taxonomy have been interpreted as equivalent, mutually exclusive, containing each other (most desirably with taxonomy as a subfield of systematics concerned with formal classification), and overlapping. There should be encouragement for the trend of using biosystematics as a synonym of biological systematics, rather than in any of the numerous ways the word has been employed.