You look away for 15 years, and...

[purpletigron]

(This one is for nellorat)

Some of us vaguely remember from school biology that there life on Earth is divided into three kingdoms. This physicist is finding out just how far things have moved along in biology...

"Until the 1990s, most biologists divided life into five main kingdoms. But new methods ... have led to ... various classification schemes ... based on six, eight or more kingdoms. As the debate continues on the kingdom level, there is broader consensus that .. life can now be assigned to three even higher levels of classification: domains."

These are Bacteria, Archaea - two very different groups of organisms that both have prokaryotic cells - and Eukarya, with eukaryotic cells. In Domain Eukarya, we have Kingdom Protista - which some biologists subdivide, - Kingdom Plantae, Kingdom Fungi, Kingdom Animalia.

Fun stuff :-)

Comments

[supergee.livejournal.com]

The three of us discussed this, and we realized that the same has happened in many areas. We used to divide up the world into the U.S., Europe, and Other.