Description The natural world is wild, but there's order to it too. To understand biological diversity, scientists arrange organisms into groups, a science called taxonomy. This absorbing volume looks at the ways people have tried to classify the living world over the centuries with a spotlight on the contributions of Carolus Linnaeus, whose system includes the now-famous categories of kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. The accessible text also explains how the science is changing with our developing knowledge of genetics. With millions of species yet to be discovered, the field of taxonomy will continue to tell us how organisms fit into the tree of life.