Sep 02 2008
West Coast Cousin
I don’t know what the name of the above flower is, photographed in San Francisco, but it reminds me of the society garlic my wife planted in our backyard. The blossoms of the society garlic are smaller and closer to pink than blue, but the family resemblance is there.
I wonder if in the future the field of biology will make a transition to a DNA-based taxonomy from the current phenotype-based. Just a thought. The tools of the trade have changed, after all. It seems to me that a taxonomy is something that exists in the human mind, rather than in nature. It is a conceptual template we use to organize our observations.
Yes?
