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| - Taxonomy, the classification of living things, is really complicated. For example, anyone who's worked in a record store and had to fit every band into one neat little category or other has an idea as to why: Many organisms defy traditional or obvious categories in the absence of genetic studies. This is why there is such a wide variety of terms for organizing living things (and theoreticians regularly come up with new ones). For the record, any group of related organisms, regardless of the degree of relatedness, is called a taxon. The major recognized taxonomic ranks are:
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| abstract
| - Taxonomy, the classification of living things, is really complicated. For example, anyone who's worked in a record store and had to fit every band into one neat little category or other has an idea as to why: Many organisms defy traditional or obvious categories in the absence of genetic studies. This is why there is such a wide variety of terms for organizing living things (and theoreticians regularly come up with new ones). Writers of fiction tend to tidy things up a bit. They regularly come up with creative ways of employing normal classification terms in ways that are incredibly inappropriate. Primarily, what seems to be at fault is a failure to recognize that the terms for taxonomic categories have specific meanings, and are not just interchangeable synonyms for "a big group of similar things". Sometimes they do know better; it's just that they couldn't resist the Beast Fable pun of having an Animal Kingdom. You know, where the lion is the King. For the record, any group of related organisms, regardless of the degree of relatedness, is called a taxon. The major recognized taxonomic ranks are:
* Domain
* Kingdom
* Phylum/Division
* Class
* Order
* Family
* Genus
* Species (If you're having trouble remembering, remember this simple mnemonic: "Danny Kaye, Please Come Over For Good Strawberries" or, if you prefer, "Dear King Phillip Came Over For Good Soup". A commonly-used one is "Dumb kids playing catch on freeways get squashed". Before "Domain" was added to the top of the list, mnemonics were "Kings Play Cards Only For Gold and Silver" and "Kings Play Chess on Fine Glass Surfaces.") Compound variations on these terms such as "subspecies" and "superfamily" are in common use. Some taxonomists also make use of the term "tribe" for a rank intermediate between subfamily and genus. This is not just limited to fiction; in a strictly factual sense birds are technically reptiles, and the whole animal, plant, fungus distinction is being rewritten of late so more often than not, it's hard to know the correct terminology because it always is changing. It doesn't help matters that the current system was invented before evolution was understood, and that the ranks are pretty arbitrary. One "genus" might be older and more diverse than another "family." Some scientists even want to abolish taxonomic ranks, though that's not likely to happen soon. The scientific Latin name for a species consists of the genus name (capitalized), followed by the species name (in all lower case), both italicised. Tyrannosaurus rex is genus Tyrannosaurus, species rex; Homo sapiens is genus Homo, species sapiens. If the species is well known, or has already been mentioned earlier in the same work, the genus name will frequently be abbreviated to a single letter, e.g. T. rex or H. sapiens. If more hairsplitting is needed, the subspecies or variety name can be appended as a third word, e.g. Homo sapiens sapiens. Frankly, it's not surprising that writers are sometimes ignorant or confused. Though this can also turn into a case of Fan Wank as many of these words also have different less precise meanings in regular English as in family and class are both used to refer to groups of similar things, a class of ships, the t-series family of trucks so a lot of these errors are just people using the words with their regular meanings. But there's really no excuse for the examples under "General", especially by scientists. Of course, things are also more complicated than even this. Cladistics, Dendrograms, Phylogenetics... We'll just leave it at this lest Your Head Asplode . Examples of Taxonomic Term Confusion include:
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