Such expressions as that famous one of Linnæus, and which we often meet with in a more or less concealed form, that the characters do not make the genus, but that the genus gives the characters, seem to imply that something more is included in our classification, than mere resemblance. I believe that something more is included; and that propinquity of descent,—the only known cause of the similarity of organic beings,—is the bond, hidden as it is by various degrees of modification, which is partially revealed to us by our classifications (Darwin, 1859, p. 413f).

Tuesday, 17 February 2009

Wordle: A Wonderful Thing


Ivonne Garzon has introduced me to Wordle - a world cloud generator. In the example above I simply entered the Systematics & Biogeography URL and it created several word clouds with names and terms that appear on the blog. This is great way to simply skim over a blog (or any URL that has a RSS feed) to find terms or names of interest. You can also cut and paste in text of your own as I did below - from the abstract of the forthcoming paper by Polly Winsor. Looks interesting!

References
Winsor, M.P. (In press). Taxonomy was the foundation of Darwin's evolution. Taxon.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I like the jumbled rather than aligned form:
http://kehan.wordpress.com/2008/09/25/my-wordle/

18 February 2009 at 01:58

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