Family (biology)

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The hierarchy of biological classification's eight major taxonomic ranks, which is an example of definition by genus and differentia. An order contains one or more families. Intermediate minor rankings are not shown.

In biological classification, family (Latin: familia) is

• a taxonomic rank. Other well-known ranks are life, domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, genus, and species, with family fitting between order and genus. As for the other well-known ranks, there is the option of an immediately lower rank, indicated by the prefix sub-: subfamily (Latin: subfamilia).
• a taxonomic unit, a taxon, in that rank. In that case the plural is families (Latin familiae)

Example: Walnuts and Hickories belong to the Walnut family.

What does and does not belong to each family is determined by a taxonomist. Similarly for the question if a particular family should be recognized at all. Often there is no exact agreement, with different taxonomists each taking a different position. There are no hard rules that a taxonomist needs to follow in describing or recognizing a family. Some taxa are accepted almost universally, while others are recognised only rarely.

History of the concept

Family, as a rank intermediate between order and genus, is a relatively recent invention.

The taxonomic term familia was first used by French botanist Pierre Magnol in his Prodromus historiae generalis plantarum, in quo familiae plantarum per tabulas disponuntur (1689) where he called families (familiae) the seventy-six groups of plants he recognised in his tables. The concept of rank at that time was still in statu nascendi, and in the preface to the Prodromus Magnol spoke of uniting his families into larger genera, which is far from how the term is used today.

Carolus Linnaeus used the word familia in his Philosophia botanica (1751) to denote major groups of plants; trees, herbs, ferns, palms, etc. He used this term only in the morphological section of the book, discussing the vegetative and generative organs of plants. Subsequently, in French botanical publications, from Michel Adanson's Familles naturelles des plantes (1763) and until the end of the 19th century, the word famille was used as a French equivalent of the Latin ordo (or ordo naturalis). In nineteenth century works such as the Prodromus of Augustin Pyramus de Candolle and the Genera Plantarum of George Bentham and J.D. Hooker this word ordo was used for what now is given the rank of family.

In zoology, the family as a rank intermediate between order and genus was introduced by Pierre André Latreille in his Précis des caractères génériques des insectes, disposés dans un ordre naturel (1796). He used families (part of them not named) in some but not in all his orders of "insects" (which then included all arthropods).

Since the beginning of the 20th century, however, the term has been consistently used in its modern sense. Its usage and characteristic ending of the names belonging to this category are governed by the various Nomenclature Codes.

See also

• Systematics, the study of the diversity of life
• Cladistics, the classification of organisms by their order of branching in an evolutionary tree
• List of families, list of family names in the taxonomy of biology
• Phylogenetics, the study of evolutionary relatedness among various groups of organisms
• Taxonomy
• Compare Family
• Virus classification
• protein family
• gene family

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