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shared history as its basis for identifying taxa. But that is not because
phenotypes are unimportant.
The search for natural classification systems in biology has turned
out to be difficult, because biological individuals are marked by both
their history and their environment. It has proved to be difficult (ar-
guably impossible) to incorporate both influences on causal profiles
within the one system of classification. If there were a single natural
taxonomy for biology, the biodiversity problem would be more trac-
table. We could unequivocally identify the natural elements from which
biological systems are composed, and their important similarities and
differences. Defining diversity would still not be easy; some systems
would be diverse because of the number of distinct elements in them
and others because of the differences between those elements, and so
we would have to weight differentiation against number. But as we shall
see, the quest for natural taxonomies in biology has been difficult, and
that exacerbates the problem of defining diversity.