Who came up with the classification system?

Answer 1

Which classification system?

Aristotles' system classified animals according to reproduction.

Until Carl Linaeus, the classification system went through several modifications. Around 1735, Linaeus used 2 kingdoms, plants and animals.

In 1866, Haeckel added a new kingdom-protista and changed vegetabilia to plantae.

In 1925, Chatton came along and reorganized the system into 2 empires--prokaryota and eukaryota.

In 1938, Copeland came along and reorganized the system into 4 kingdoms--protoctista, fungi, plantae, animalia.

In 1969, Whittaker reorganized our classification system into 5 kingdoms--monera, protista, fungi, plantae, animalia.

A few short years later, in 1977, Woese and his associates came along and reorganized the system again--into 6 kingdoms--eubacteria, archaebacteria, protista, fungi, plantae, and animalia.

Then, in 1990, Woese and his associates came along and reorganized our classification system again into 3 domains--bacteria, archaea, and eukarya.

Currently, we have the Cavalier-Smith classification--or at least the last time I checked. Another system may have cropped up since then. This was in 2004. We have 6 kingdoms now--bacteria, protozoa, chromista, fungi, plantae, and animalia.

However, with our current trend in classifying (which to me, seems more like an elaborate venn diagram system that's used to understand what we learn rather than hard facts of nature), and taking into account our increasing understanding of DNA and whatnot, I suspect we'll all be learning a new classification system by genomes instead of physical characteristics and this method will be thrown out all together.