h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

FIVE Kingdoms? Where did these other three suddenly spring from, then?

In my day it was just Animal and Plant, and bloody mushrooms knew their place, they were Plants... not some sort of breakaway post colonial republic with big ideas... ("The Kingdom of Fungi hitherto declares unilateral independence from the repressive and imperialist Kingdom of Plants... no longer will we be looked down upon for not having flowers or stamens or asters or pollen or any of the decadent imperialist apparatus, for un-natural consorting with aphid or aparian representatives of the Animal Kingdom, oh no. From today on, there is a new dawn for all organisms that propagate by means of the pure method of casting fruiting spores to the winds!" ) et c.

Then prokaryote ("in favour of karyotes" ?)representing everything without a cell nucleus - does this include blood corpuscles?

then finally there's a sort of catch-all file called"Protocist", for Everything Else...

You do realise this is yet another plank in the coffin of "Everything I Learnt in School in the 1970's?" This is on a par with discovering that Turkey is really in Europe and not, as we were taught thirty years ago, in Asia (continental drift working far more quickly than anyone thought, then...)

Good entry, though! Even if it does invalidate my 1978 O-level in Biology...

Pro-karyote: 'before nucleus'

Eu-karyote: 'true nucleus' (or possibly 'European nucleus'

Or so people who speak far better Greek than me assure me.

No, prokaryotes don't include red blood cells, as they are not an organism (though I see what you mean about them not having a nucleus).

And trust me, it gets way more complicated than that with the Kingdoms. Some split bacteria into two kingdoms, others try to combine two kingdoms. 5 is the most commonly used model.

Did they really not class bacteria as a separate kingdom in the 1970s?

Gif

I went to school in the 1960s when LSD meant pounds, shillings and pence, three feet made a yard, and room-size computers sent men to the