I understand the names of the different ranks and their order, but what actually separates them to make them different? I understand the domain and a little bit of kingdom, but when it gets down to species and order, It flies over my head.
In: Biology
One thing to remember is that the entire taxonomic system was invented by humans to try and provide some degree of order to what we observe in the world. Nature is not bound by our classifications and has no responsibility in honoring it.
It is just a human way of classifying things and we change it around all the time as more information becomes available.
Depending on when you went to school even the most simple divisions of Domain and Kingdoms that you were taught might have changed several times since then.
There is a desire to keep what it means to be in the same Order, Genus etc the same across all species, but it is inherently just a man-made system that does not perfectly map onto the reality of life that we see around us.
We even sometimes get into trouble with figuring out what it means to be a species vs sub-species.
We also need to put in more layers on occasions to come up with things like infra-orders or create grouping without formal names.
It is all a bit more messy than it should be.
Mostly it is just a classification system that tells us which living things are more closely related to each other.
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