onsulted) slime molds, amoebas,and even sea contained as many as 200,000different species of organism all told. t’s a lot of odd socks.
Ironically, just as taker’s five-kingdom classification o find its o textbooks, a retiring academic at ty of Illinois o do so—lystudying genetic sequences in bacteria. In takingprocess. ork on a single bacterium could easily consume a year. At t time, according tooese, only about 500 species of bacteria ten times t, t is stillfar s of tedorganisms whe annals of biology.
It isn’t simple indifference t keeps total loeria can be exasperatingly difficultto isolate and study. Only about 1 percent ure. Considering able ture, it is an odd fact t t to ri dis liet to bloom. Any bacterium t tion exceptional, and yet t exclusively, tudied bymicrobiologists. It animals from visiting zoos.”
Genes, o approac tal divisions in ted. A lot of little organisms t looked like bacteria and beeria ually sometoget eria a long time ago. oese called teria, later sened toarchaea.
It ttributes t distinguiseria are not t t a biologist. tly differences in tidoglycan. But in practice t from bacteria ted division of life, so fundamentalt it stood above t tree of Life, as it isratially known.
In 1976, artled t least ttle bit of it t tention—byredraree of life to incorporate not five main divisions, but ty-tegories—Bacteria, Arcimesspelled Eucarya)—which he called domains.
oese’s ne take torm. Some dismissed too ed to ignored to Frances As, “felt bitterly disappointed.” But slocs. Botanists and zoologists s virtues.
It’s not o see edto a feermost brancounicellular beings.
“t up to classify in terms of gross morpies anddifferences,” oese told an intervieerms of molecularsequence is a bit o s see a difference like it. And so ted raditional five-kingdom division—an arrangement t oese called “not very useful” in s and “positively misleading” muc of time. “Biology, like p,” oese e, “o a level erest and teracti