Meaning of Species

SpeciesGreek philosophers are thought to be the first to classify animals and plants, each class having similar attributes. While the story behind the term species (Greek εἶδος) began with Plato, defining the meaning of species continues to be controversial.

Building on Plato, Aristotle used genus (γένος) and species as philosophical categories. A genus was a category, and a species was a subcategory of a genus. At the time, the two terms were just as often applied to inanimate things as to living ones. Then, as of now, the term has continued looking for a definition.

Charles Darwin agonized over the longstanding problem of the term. In The Origin of Species, Darwin wrote,

“… of the term species. No one definition has satisfied all naturalists.”

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Universe Shouldn’t Exist

higgs bisonAfter spending more than $6 billion on constructing the particle collider in western Europe, known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) (pictured below), In the search to solve physics’ greatest mysteries, the evidence is seemingly pointing to one astounding fact – “the universe shouldn’t exist.”

Physicists Peter Higgs and François Englert, working on the most expensive experiment in the history of science, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the long sought-after Higgs boson or Higgs particle (pictured left), which is pivotal to the Standard Model of physics, in 2012. While the evidence continues to validate the existence of the particle, ironically the evidence may unravel the Big Bang theory for the origin of the universe.

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