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It used to be as easy as animal, vegetable, and mineral. My fifth-grade daughter was assigned some homework for the weekend. She had to illustrate the Five Kingdoms. The Five Kingdoms? Well, there’s Munchkin Land, the Emerald City, Winki Country… “No, Mom, you know, Animals, Plants, Fungi, Monderans…” What? Monderans?
When I was her age, all life was divided into the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom. Since then, discoveries have strained the definition of a plant or an animal. There are things that just don’t fit. As soon as we think we’ve got it figured out and create new definitions, along comes another lifeform that doesn’t fit the new taxonomy, either. Since when is fungi not a plant? I looked up taxonomy at Wikipedia, and found this image by Peter Halasz. Things have changed a bit since I was in school. I thought kingdoms were at the top of the taxonomy tree. I understand “life”, to separate it from non-living things, but “domain” is a new one to me, and for good reason -it was introduced in 1990. The resulting six kingdoms have yet to make it to my child’s elementary school.
My daughter was having a hard time finding a picture of “Monderans” (which sounded like some kind of art to me), so I enlisted the help of Google. Thanks to the “Did you mean…” feature, we determined she meant Monerans, which I then found out was a fancy name for bacteria. Bacteria were once listed in the Protista kingdom, which started as a catch-all for unicellular organisms that were just too hard to classify as plant or animal. Bacteria were thrown out when it was determined they don’t have nuclei. Every kingdom must have its standards.
In search of the new kingdoms, after the jump.
Fungi was separated into its own kingdom (Eumycota) in 1968, but didn’t make it into high school texts til years later. Fungi diverged from plants about a billion years ago, since they didn’t want to get with the program and biosynthesize using chloroplasts, which were all the rage at the time. These renegade mushrooms still don’t use chloroplasts, but they are green with bioluminescence.
Archaea, or archaeobacteria, are single-celled organisms with no nuclei. That sounds like bacteria, but biologists have determined that chemically, they have more in common with plants and animals they do with bacteria. So… in 1977 they got their own kingdom! Or, domain, if you go by the three-domain system.
The three domains, therefore, are Bacteria (or Monera), Archaea, and Eucaryota (everything else). Bacteria and Archaea are their own kingdoms (for now), and the Eucaryota domain is divided into Plants, Animals, Protists, and Fungi.
In the five-kingdom system taught in fifth grade this week, Bacteria and Archaea are still classified as Monera. I can well understand why. You try deciphering the difference between the two, and imagine translating that into a fifth-grade reading level textbook! I found some nice examples of Monera which my child dutifully rendered on posterboard. There’ll be no markdown over the spelling, since the teacher spelled Monerans with a “d” in the instructions.
The six-kingdom system isn’t the end of the taxonomy struggle. In high school, I got in trouble for something I don’t recall now, but the teacher assigned me to write a ten-page essay on “the meaning of life” as a punishment. To make things easier, I interpreted that as the definition of life, and handed in twenty-five pages. Along the way, I became fascinated with viruses. Scientists were debating whether or not viruses should be classified as a kingdom, or whether they should be classified as living at all. To be a living thing, a species must be able to reproduce. Viruses can reproduce, as anyone who has suffered the flu can attest. But they cannot do so on their own; a virus must invade a host cell, inject its own DNA, and depend upon the host cell to reproduce, as described here.
The virus conundrum still exists, but the very edge of the definition of life gets even weirder when you consider prions, which are nothing more than proteins, but can replicate themselves. Mad Cow Disease is caused by those baffling prions, which is why they haven’t found a cure yet.
It took me about two hours to get caught up on what’s new in taxonomy since I finished school …a few years ago. Once again I am humbled to find out how much there is still to learn about the earth we live on. So here’s a nice picture of the two kingdoms we are most familiar with.
Update: My child got an A on her poster, since she could demonstrate an understanding of the material better than the other students!
Comments (13)
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Wow! That was really informative. If you can do us a favor and bring us up to speed on how many states of matter there are now, we’ll all be smarter than fifth-graders again!!!
posted by Aaron on 9-4-2007 at 5:47 am
Wow, I took AP Biology just last year and I think I learned a few things differently. We did have a pretty awesome mnemonic, though: Does King Phillip Consider Obese Female Gorillas Sexy? [Yes.]
posted by Aemi on 9-4-2007 at 5:49 am
My students (high school) always got indignant when we added stuff that wasn’t in the list they had learned before, variety especially seemed to upset them. “What do you mean there is sometimes another level past species.”
posted by Susan on 9-4-2007 at 8:41 am
Aaron, can’t help you with the newer stages of matter (originals were solid, liquid, & gas… but then some wise-ass came up with plasma). Dunno what has come up since I quit taking physics classes seriously – Newton & Einstein’s universe came apart and we ended up with Quantum and String Theory.
Personally, I think all this is just a way for PhD candidates and University Profs to justify their research grants.
I do recall Doug Adams announced the discovery/labeling of all sub-atomic particles but can’t remember what they were, other than one was “peppermint”.
posted by Doc on 9-4-2007 at 9:00 am
I like your daughter’s illustration. Is that a Fly Algaric mushroom I spy? And is that not toast right below it? With some butter on it?
posted by Johnny Cat on 9-4-2007 at 10:47 am
That is toast (or bread), with mold instead of butter! I think she just labeled the top picture as “mushroom.”
posted by Miss Cellania on 9-4-2007 at 10:52 am
ugh. i think i’m going to go shoot myself now instead of facing down the crap i’m going to have to learn in biology when i go back to college shortly to get my genetics degree. lol
well, at least i found this article, which should (hopefully) give me a leg up on my studies.
i just got out of a bio-intensive course load not too long ago, and i sure don’t remember anythign about domain and life.
oh, my head hurts. lol
they change this stuff way too often.
but at least you have to give the string theory people one thing: it makes for facinating reading!
posted by Sue on 9-4-2007 at 12:24 pm
Not too long ago, dna analysis revealed that we are more closely related to fungi than to green plants.
It’s thought that this is why yeast infections are so difficult to get rid of.
Personally, I like my fruiting bodies on pizza or sautéed in butter and garlic.
posted by john csakany on 9-4-2007 at 12:43 pm
Seriously. I just graduated college last year, taking some serious science classes along the way, and none of it was this complicated. If they’re teaching fifth graders this kind of thing, maybe I should rethink teaching preschool. They’ll be having me teach the kiddies how to fingerpaint pictures of quarks and how to make a papier-mache Schrodinger’s cat.
posted by Molly on 9-4-2007 at 12:53 pm
Another trick to remembering the taxonomy order:
King Philip Comes Over For Girl Scouts… that’s saved me in zoology and anthro classes.
great article too!
posted by Amy on 9-4-2007 at 4:46 pm
Hah hah… I remebered the King Phillip mnemonic a little different so I thought I’d look it up. It turns out there are a LOT of variants, many pretty funny:
en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Biology_mnemonics.
As for Molly – Yes, this is exactly what they *should* be teaching 5th graders. Unfortunately, the dumbed-down curriculae of many (US) government schools concentrate on fluff for the first 8 or 9 years and not too many facts. Read about E.D. Hirsch (and he’s not the only one!) for some better ideas on educating our children.
Straight talk from Sid.
posted by Sid Morrison on 9-4-2007 at 5:20 pm
Um, Sid, do you teach? Because most teachers really don’t appreciate those outside of the education field telling them what their job should or should not consist of. (Do engineers like it when regular outsiders tell them how to do their jobs??) Just because you once went to school does NOT make you an expert on what teachers should teach or not teach in their classrooms.
Sorry, that’s just a pet peeve of mine. But, regardless, most teachers have very little, if anything, to say with what they teach in the classroom. It comes in the form of lovely curriculum documents and standards and benchmarks and on and on. Teachers are told WHAT to teach, and for the most part left alone as to HOW to teach it. (that does vary somewhat between schools and districts/states) As a first grade teacher, I object to your statement that I teach FLUFF. (thanks for saying that I do nothing all day long; appreciate it!)
You come and try to teach 20 6 year olds how to read and then try making that statement again. Just because what we teach small children is simple facts, does not make our job simple, or fluffy. You can’t learn how to do higher level mathematics until you learn to add and subtract, and you can’t read complex biology papers until you learn how to sound out ‘cat.’
There is some redundancy in what we teach children, but a lot of that is due to the fact that it takes children some 300-3000 times of hearing something to actually learn it. (why you can’t just show a kid the letter b once and they know the name and the sound) I don’t agree with everything that goes on in the US education system (why I don’t teach in it… I teach in China at an international school- I have taught in the US, and my mother is a teacher, so I know the system inside and out.) but there are whole lot of good teachers out there doing their best to teach children what they will need to know in the future.
Also, it’s less so the curricula at the elementary level that needs tweaking, it’s at the high school level that the US falls behind. No matter where you live, you need to learn how to read and write and do basic math, that’s not going to change. Children also think concretely, and you can’t force them to think abstractly before they’re ready (about age 10-12). You can give them the skills that they will need to think creatively, and use problem solving skills, but a 5th grader is barely ready cognitively to grasp the kingdoms described above. Which is why the teacher had the students draw pictures of each of the kingdoms- it makes it more concrete and less abstract. They can learn the basic concept and build on it later when they are ready.
Finally, facts are not what our children need. Memorizing straight facts are important, but not the end-all. (having your times tables memorized is a valuable skill for example.) It’s the ability to think outside of the box, the problem-solving, reasoning skillsthat will help our children to succeed in the next 50-100 years as technology and the world expands and somehow shrinks at the same time. My 15 students come from 12 countries and speak very often more than one language, about half hold 2 passports, and most have probably been to more countries and hold more visas than the average American adult. But they still need to learn how to read. I take my job, my calling very seriously.
posted by greenstrawberries on 9-20-2007 at 5:16 am
Well, that was intense. I hear you, greenstrawberries. What you are doing is noble. I am a teacher, too, in a Montessori upper elementary classroom. I was actually checking out this site because I am planning a lesson on the Domain System. It was interesting to read the article from the parent, and then read reactions from others. I am psyched to teach the domains, but I am doing my research because it is complicated. And, I do have a say in what I teach; I have chosen to take this on. That is one of the benefits of Montessori teaching. I hope my kids at least take from this that science is always changing based on research and discovery.
posted by Madeline on 11-14-2007 at 11:00 pm