who created the systematic classification of plants and life giving species its modern definition
Carl Linnaeus
title: History of plant systematics text: History of plant systematics The history of plant systematics—the biological classification of plants—stretches from the work of ancient Greek to modern evolutionary biologists. As a field of science, plant systematics came into being only slowly, early plant lore usually being treated as part of the study of medicine. Later, classification and description was driven by natural history and natural theology. Until the advent of the theory of evolution, nearly all classification was based on the scala naturae. The professionalization of botany in the 18th and 19th century marked a shift toward more holistic classification methods, eventually based on evolutionary relationships. title: History of plant systematics text: For the first time relatedness could be measured in real terms, namely similarity of the molecules comprising the genetic code. History of plant systematics The history of plant systematics—the biological classification of plants—stretches from the work of ancient Greek to modern evolutionary biologists. As a field of science, plant systematics came into being only slowly, early plant lore usually being treated as part of the study of medicine. Later, classification and description was driven by natural history and natural theology. Until the advent of the theory of evolution, nearly all classification was based on the scala naturae. The professionalization of title: History of plant systematics text: those of English botanist and natural theologian John Ray and French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort. Ray, who listed over 18,000 plant species in his works, is credited with establishing the monocot/dicot division and some of his groups — mustards, mints, legumes and grasses — stand today (though under modern family names). Tournefort used an artificial system based on logical division which was widely adopted in France and elsewhere in Europe up until Linnaeus. The book that had an enormous accelerating effect on the science of plant systematics was "Species Plantarum" (1753) by Linnaeus. It presented a complete list of title: Plant life-form text: A popular life-form scheme is the Raunkiær system. One of the earliest attempts to classify the life-forms of plants and animals was made by Aristotle, whose writings are lost. His pupil, Theophrastus, in "Historia Plantarum" (c. 350 BC), was the first who formally recognized plant habits: trees, shrubs and herbs. Some earlier authors (e.g., Humboldt, 1806) did classify species according to physiognomy, but were explicit about the entities being merely plactical classes without any relation to plant function. A marked exception was A. P. de Candolle (1818) attempt to construct a natural system of botanical classification. His system was based title: History of plant systematics text: was the theory of evolution (Charles Darwin published "Origin of Species" in 1859), resulting in the aim to group plants by their phylogenetic relationships. To this was added the interest in plant anatomy, aided by the use of the light microscope and the rise of chemistry, allowing the analysis of secondary metabolites. Currently, the strict use of epithets in botany, although regulated by international codes, is considered unpractical and outdated. The very notion of species, the fundamental classification unit, is often up to subjective intuition and thus can not be well defined. As a result, estimate of the total number