Classification

History of the Naming System

In the 1730s, Carl Linnaeus, a scientists that worked on taxonomy, pushed forward his ideas that there should be a naming culture for every organism known to humankind.

He formed the Linnaean binomial system of nomenclature. This is where we use Latin names for species, genuses and families. Every organism we know has a name. As a human, your binomial nomenclature is Homo sapiens.

Take a look at this YouTube video to see what I mean.

Let's explain the relative example given in the video.

How to Classify

First off, imagine [you may well have] a large collection of music that you need to sort so you can better understand it all. This music is all just sat in a single folder, songs everywhere, no order to it. Then you figure 'oh, I may as well sort it', so you start. But where do you start?

If you think about it, you can start by sorting the music into genres. This would then see you place them into groups of music together - Rock, Pop, Country, Indie, Alternative, Dance, and so on.

Now, you can sort those genres out into artists. So for Rock, for example, you can have The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Kaiser Chiefs, Oasis, Blur, Pulp, The Darkness, and so on.

So, you've got your genres, and you have your artists. Now you need to sort them by album. For this, I will use Kaiser Chiefs. So you would put them in order: Employment (2005), Yours Truly, Angry Mob (2007), Off with Their Heads (2008), The Future is Medieval (2011), Education, Education, Education & War (2014), Stay Together (2016), Duck (2019).

Now we're getting somewhere. We know what genre the music is in (Rock), what the artist name is (Kaiser Chiefs), and the albums they have made. You can go further and list the songs in each album. But for me, I think this should explain the process enough for understanding.

The Animal Kingdom

In reference to the animal kingdom, this can be applied equally as easy. Let's take a butterfly species. I've used this particular species with a student before, and it worked quite well.

Danaus plexippus

This is commonly known in the UK as the Monarch butterfly. We know it is a species of butterfly, simply by the fact of it's binomial name - Danaus plexippus. This name is Latin, and is split up into two terms. Danaus is the Genus, and plexippus is the species name. This means there are other butterflies that have the Genus name Danaus, but the only one to have the name plexippus is the Monarch butterfly.

Levels of Taxonomy

There are several levels of Taxonomy. They include:

Kingdom

Kingdom is the topmost level. It is split into 5 areas - Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista, Archaea and Monera/Prokaryote. These are like the Genre in your music collection. So now you would know that in the animal kingdom (back to the Monarch), it would be listed under Animalia.

Interesting fact: in the UK, we use a 5-system set of kingdoms, whereas other countries use a 6-system set. This is due to scientists having added extras in upon research of microbiology.

Phylum

Second in line is Phylum. As you will notice, all the levels in taxonomy deal with slight differences between them. In the case of your music collection, it would be the artists there. In terms of the Monarch butterfly, this is classed as Arthropoda. This means that it belongs to the same phylum as a scorpion, for instance, as it has an exoskeleton, a segmented body and paired joint appendages.

Class

The third level is Class. Again, the levels in taxonomy deal with slight differences. Your music collection then places the albums in this section. In the animal kingdom, and particularly for the Monarch butterfly, this would be Insecta - meaning it is a type of insect.

Order

The fourth level is Order. You get the idea now, so your music collection (and final in this example) would be the song names. In the Monarch butterfly's example, this would be Lepidoptera. This means 'scaled wings' in Greek, and is the most widely known of the insect orders. It covers 10% of all described species of living organisms.

Family

The fifth level is Family. This simply means it has a family of genus and species. It further narrows down between the differences of the insect, and in the case of the Monarch, its family is called Nymphalidae.

Genus

The sixth level is Genus. This is where the Monarch butterfly begins to get its Latin name - Danaus.

Species

The seventh and last level. This is where we know that if it was a type of dog, we would say German Shepherd, Daschund, Border Collie, and so on. Or if it was a type of cat, we could say (domestic) rag doll, short hair, sphinx, siamese. Or bigger cats would be lion, tiger, leopard, and cheetah. In our example of the butterfly, this is plexippus.