Thanks for that. I've never understood it. How many "kingdoms" are there, anyway? How many classes, etc.? Do you know of a website where it's all spelled out in a simple straightforward way so a complete beginner can understand it? Thanks.
The Linneaen system is actually outdated at the moment, but I think that you can say with pretty high confidence that there are 3 "kingdoms": Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukaryota. And then there are the viruses, but nobody's really sure just what the hell they are or where they came from, because they evolve so quickly.
The most up-to-date website, although it claims not to be comprehensive in any regard, is the NCBI Taxonomy site: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/Browser/wwwtax.cgi?mode=Root. But if you're a complete beginner, then the best place to go exploring is the Tree of Life: http://tolweb.org
They keep revising it. A beginner would become expert just by keeping up with changes. Also, Latin is used, but it is modern Latin, not that Caesar junk they teach in high school.
I don't get a lot of this eaither -biology has never been my interest and has always been hard for me because its hard for me to memorize things unless I understand them.
And I don't suggest taking Wikipedia as fact - we know it can be manipulated.
But when the articles are clearly written and well source I find them useful.
I have used the Living organisms article and its helped me. It includes this list of the hierarchy and each of the word links to an article for more detail. For examplew following the link for kingdons I found a chart that showed life was originally classified in two kindoms but as more discoveries were made that grew to 6 kingdoms.
Good luck.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_organisms
>>Organizational terminology
All organisms are classified by the science of alpha taxonomy into either taxa or clades.
Taxa are ranked groups of organisms which run from the general (domain) to the specific (species). A broad scheme of ranks in hierarchical order is:
* Domain
* Kingdom
* Phylum
* Class
* Order
* Family
* Genus
* Species
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