[HN Gopher] Evolution is not a tree of life but a fuzzy network
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Evolution is not a tree of life but a fuzzy network
Author : ALee
Score : 41 points
Date : 2022-04-24 17:30 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aeon.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (aeon.co)
| MathMonkeyMan wrote:
| It's certainly a tree of individuals, though with single-celled
| division even that is not clear.
|
| Things get tricky when you talk about species, because species
| are (arbitrary?) equivalency classes of individuals.
| Tagbert wrote:
| Species are approximations that can be useful to discuss
| populations but they are very fuzzy at the edges. There is not
| single definition of species that applies in all cases. In that
| sense they are somewhat arbitrary but terms can be arbitrary
| and useful at the same time.
| Flankk wrote:
| Darwin believed that each successive generation of a species had
| increasing mutations leading to a gradual divergence. Another
| school of thought believes that a species remains at equilibrium
| until some environmental stressor activates a rapid divergence.
| If this "punctuated equilibrium" is true, climate change will
| give rise to many new species, as would all mass extinctions.
| seandhuine wrote:
| What Darwin knew about biology is incommensurate with a modern
| understanding of the word "mutation". A generation later than
| him, biologists still believed cells were formless blobs of
| jelly, so to speak. Punctuated equilibrium is even less
| defensible given our present understanding of the molecular
| basis of genetics.
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| I've always said it's not the _Tree of Life_ , but rather the
| _DAG of Life_.
| User23 wrote:
| It may not even be acyclic. For example it appears fetal DNA is
| permanently detectable in mothers and may even have health
| benefits that conceivably increase the mother's evolutionary
| fitness.
| westurner wrote:
| How can it be acyclic? A phylogenetic tree is a DAG.
| Organisms sharing DNA? That's definitely a cyclic graph.
|
| If there were Schema.org/Animal and/or schema:AnimalInstance
| classes, what do you list under a :breed property to indicate
| that e.g. one parent is breed X and another is breed Y?!
| That's definitely not a DAG; that looks like a feature
| clustering dendrogram.
|
| DNA barcoding > Mismatches between conventional
| (morphological) and barcode based identification https://en.w
| ikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_barcoding#Mismatches_betwe...
|
| Taxonomy (biology)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy_(biology)
|
| FWIU, there's at least one DNA-based organism naming system;
| IDK how much that helps resolve :Animal and :AnimalInstance
| if at all?
| jfarmer wrote:
| The hypergraph of life?
| agumonkey wrote:
| I'd go full mad and say the space continuum of life. Context is
| what drives life. Similar context breed similar forces and
| genes.
| Swizec wrote:
| > Similar context breed similar forces and genes
|
| Flight is so useful, it evolved 4 times independently. With
| very similar solutions.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_and_gliding_animals
|
| And crustaceans keep evolving into crabs.
| https://www.popsci.com/story/animals/why-everything-
| becomes-...
|
| And who even knows how many different times high level
| intelligence has evolved. I think octopi, birds, and mammals
| are all good examples of separate intelligence tracks with
| similar results.
| peter303 wrote:
| 5% - 8% of human genome appears to be from [retro]virus inserts.
| Thats outside the tree of descent.
| LB232323 wrote:
| Evolutionary biology is sincerely beautiful, the biological
| history of our species is a meta-history to human history.
|
| On a grander scale, the biological history of life itself weaves
| the career of the human race into a context of profound
| interconnectivity.
|
| It's natural to contemplate your origins, the place and culture
| you come from, your ancestors and the history of your family.
| It's even more profound to contemplate your biological origins,
| your ancestry into species unrecognizable from your own.
|
| It really is a humbling experience to trace a path thousands and
| even millions of years into the past. The end result is an
| increased appreciation for the beauty of nature and for the
| inseparable unity of the human race.
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