Wordpress Themes

Archive for July, 2007

Small Kingdoms

Posted by Laura Ashby on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007

One of the themes of Small Worlds is that our usual (large) world isn’t the only one.

Colin Tudge says this:

“Indeed, whereas taxonomists once recognised just two kingdoms of eukaryotes (animals and plants) or three (animals, plants, and fungi), or four (animals, plants, fungi and ‘protoctists’), some modern biologists now acknowledge 20 kingdoms or more, and most of these are protists. Our own kingdom, the Animalia, has thus been dramatically demoted: from a conceptual 50 per cent of the whole to less than 5 per cent. Thus humans have been driven from the centre of the biological stage just as the astronomy of Copernicus and Galileo shifted planet Earth from the centre of the Universe.”

Colin Tudge, The Variety of Life, Oxford: OUP, 2000, p.128

Navigation

Search

Archives

July 2007
M T W T F S S
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031  

Other

Syndication