Resumen de Progress in biosustematics: an overview
The nomenclatural and taxonomic system for botany introduced by Linnaeus and improved by many generations of later botanists has had as its principal aim to make possible information storage and retrieval about plants and plant products. To Linnaeus and his contemporaries this meant disclosing the divine plan of creation; to post-Darwinian botanists it implied surveying the results of evolution. Like biology in general, taxonomic botany has experienced a succession of partly contemporaneous new approaches or waves of fashion, such as anatomy, embryologyserodiagnostics, cytotaxonomy, biosystematics, palynology, phytochemistry, numerical taxonomy and cladistics. The term biosystematics, originally ibiosystematy', was coined as an umbrella for a number of methods dealing with living plants and plant populations. Some of these approaches, like chromosome studies, hybridization work and comparative cultivations, had been started long before. Biosystematics may be defined as 'research that endeavours, by study of living populations, to delimit the natural biological units and to classify them objectively as taxa of different orders of magnitude'. This goal conies very close to that of "classical taxonomy", and in recent years the borderline between the two has been largely dissolved -none of them can be profitably pursued without the other. It has even been proposed to discard the term biosystematics, but as exemplified in this paper, the investigation methods nested under its umbrella are equally important today as when the term was coined.
