Principle of Conservatism of Cellular Structures as the Basis for Construction of the Multikingdom System of the Organic Word

This chapter describes the history of megasystematics (taxonomy of higher taxons) from Karl Linnaeus till the present day. Nowadays, the Whittaker’s five-kingdom system of cellular organisms is the best known. This system has made monophyletic the kingdoms of plants, fungi, and animals but increased the heterogeneity of the kingdom Protoctista. There is one of the qualitative peculiarities of the subcellular level of the organization of living systems, which has been named “the principle of conservatism.” We offer the multikingdom system of cellular organisms, based on this principle. In many ways, it can be done based on intuition. We promote the concept of three branches of cellular organisms that is accepted in megasystematics. It is proposed to give these branches of organic word the rank of domains Archaea, Bacteria, and Eucarya. The Empire Cellulata is divided into three domains, which, in turn, are divided into several kingdoms. Our system contains 26 kingdoms.