Think about something that you have in great abundance, maybe your digital music collection.
You may have many songs by many different artists that span many different types of music.
What if you wanted to organize this music collection so you could easily and quickly find a specific song?
How would you go about doing this?
You wouldn’t just throw all the songs into one big folder-that would make it impossible to find the song you wanted.
Maybe you could start off by organizing music by genre –
rock music, country music, indie rock, and funk.
This would help, but you would still have a lot of very different songs in each folder.
You could organize it further and within each genre, group them by artist.
This would provide a little more organization.
From there you could organize the different songs of an individual artist by album.
Then, only 8-20 songs would be in each folder.
Finally, you might want to make sure each song is labeled by its own individual name.
This organization would help you easily find a song that you wanted without listening to hundreds of songs first.
Scientists classify all living things in a similar manner.
They are organized into different groups based on similarities between their lineage, physiology, and genetic make up.
When classifying organisms, scientists start at the most inclusive,
or biggest group, and end at the least inclusive, or smallest group.
Let’s go ahead and use humans as an example.
We’ll classify humans all the way from the most inclusive group - domain to the least inclusive group - species.
Let’s start at the top with domain.
There are three domains, and all living organisms fall into one of these.
Humans are in domain Eukarya.
The next most inclusive group is kingdom.
Humans belong to kingdom Animalia, or the animal kingdom.
Within each kingdom, organisms are further divided into phylums. Humans fall into the phylum Chordata, along with dogs, fish, monkeys, and birds.
Humans fall into the phylum Chordata, along with dogs, fish, monkeys, and birds.
These are all organisms that have a backbone.
Within each phyla, organisms are grouped into classes.
Humans belong to the class Mammalia, or mammals.
These are organisms that have fur and produce milk.
This class still includes dogs and monkeys, but excludes fish and birds.
Within each class, organisms are grouped into different orders.
Humans belong within the order Primates, along with monkeys.
Dogs are not included in this order.
Within each order, organisms are grouped further into families.
Humans belong to the family called Hominidae.
The great apes, including chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans are also included in this family, but other monkeys are not.
Within each family, organisms are grouped into a genus category.
Humans are within the genus Homo.
They are the only living organisms within this genus, but other genera may have several different organisms within it.
Finally, each genus is divided into species.
Humans belong to the species sapiens.
Scientists typically refer to specific organisms by genus and species.
When written, these two groups are always written in italics (or underlined if hand-written).
The genus name is written first, and is capitalized.
The species name is written second, and is not capitalized.
So the scientific name for humans is written Homo sapiens.
There are a lot of useful memory tricks for learning the classifications of life,
but here’s a simple mnemonic that may help you memorize the first letter of each level.
Dear King Peter Came Over For Good Soup.