Institute of Biology and Soil Sciences, Far East Branchof Russian Academy of Science, Vladivostok 690022, Russia

Abstract

The paper deals with the reflection of evolutionary development in some taxonomicalsystem of living organisms. Such system despite all its imperfectness, inevitability looks like"hierarchical model" of biota evolution. The popular criticism of the "hierarchical principle" ofa system construction and the conventional nature of "Linnean categories" is primarily based onthe confusion of notion and is due to either the prevalence of genealogical point of view or theemphasizing combinative nature of character states. However, genealogies, homologies, pa-rallelism, combinativeness take place at a single (and each) hierarchical level; cannot prevent theperception of the whole hierarchical structure of biota as the result of the successive increase inthe diversity. If the contemporary evolutionary theories are addressed, one can see the advocatesof "punctuated equilibrium" to develop "a hierarchical approach to evolution" as an approachdifferent from Darwinian "gradualistic model", but this argument remains within narrowframework and docs not lead to the necessary renewal of the synthetic theory.