Book Description

"This work explores how living organisms have been classified at the highest level. The earliest ideas of nature emphasised transformation. Aristotle recognised that certain objects in the sea share properties of plants and animals; these became known as zoophytes. The narrative follows zoophytes and other transgressive beings through subsequent philosophical and religious traditions, myths, travellers' tales, the occult literature, alchemy, scholasticism, the consolidation of vernacular languages, and the rise of scientific botany and zoology. Leeuwenhoek's discovery of microscopic beings, and Trembley studies on Hydra, complicated the plant-animal dichotomy. Transformation returned as Needham, Buffon and others observed plant material to generate motile animalcules; Linnaeus proposed a Regnum Chaoticum. New challenges arose as the Great Chain of Being was abandoned, algae were observed to liberate free-swimming zoospores, and cell theory was refined. Biology developed differently in France, Germany and Britain, and we follow the rise and fall of supernumerary kingdoms in each environment. Haeckel positioned Protista as one of two, three or four kingdoms. In the Twentieth century the living world was divided between prokaryotes and eukaryotes, while mitochondria and plastids were recognised as descendants of endosymbiotic bacteria. Molecular evidence revealed three domains (Archaea, Bacteria, Eukaryota), although many genomes are linked in a dynamic network of genetic relationships. Environmental genomes now threaten to undermine Eukaryota as an independent domain of life"--