[HN Gopher] Giant, fungus-like organism may be a completely unkn...
___________________________________________________________________
Giant, fungus-like organism may be a completely unknown branch of
life
Author : wglb
Score : 278 points
Date : 2025-03-27 23:15 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.livescience.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.livescience.com)
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| Prototaxites, an ancient treetrunk-mushroom-like organism that
| preceded land plants about 400M yr ago. Its fossils contained
| plantlike lignin instead of funguslike chitin or chitosan.
|
| https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.14.643340v1
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototaxites
| Liquix wrote:
| hilarious:
|
| _John William Dawson, a Canadian scientist, studied
| Prototaxites fossils, which he described as partially rotten
| giant conifers, containing the remains of the fungi which had
| been decomposing them. This concept was not disputed until
| 1872, when the rival scientist William Carruthers poured
| ridicule on the idea. ... Dawson fought adamantly to defend his
| original interpretation until studies of the microstructure
| made it clear that his position was untenable, whence he
| promptly attempted to rename the genus himself, calling it
| Nematophyton ( "stringy plant"), and denying with great
| vehemence that he had ever considered it to be a tree._
| qbxk wrote:
| > Prototaxites did not contain chitin, a major building block of
| fungal cell walls and a hallmark of the fungal kingdom. The
| Prototaxites fossils instead appeared to contain chemicals
| similar to lignin, which is found in the wood and bark of plants.
| ... best considered a member of a previously undescribed,
| entirely extinct group of eukaryotes
|
| So these are the ancestors of Groot? or Ents? and all manner of
| "animated trees"?
| sshine wrote:
| Protogroots
| a3w wrote:
| Protomolecule.
|
| Allows for Protozombies [as seen on TV]?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's fine as long as it also allows for warp gates.
| guerrilla wrote:
| I am Groot. I _am_ Groot? I am _Groot_.
| N_A_T_E wrote:
| Pretty sure this was a major plot point of the latest resident
| evil game.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| There's one of them at the back of my fridge.
| mfdoom13 wrote:
| Common Side Effects, here we come.
| chasil wrote:
| I'm still trying to wrap my head around nitroplasts, another
| newfound plastid.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Is there a point in Earth's history where if you were to visit
| you'd find it was just a fungus planet, with no other form of
| life? Could there have been fungal type creatures that lived,
| died, and left no trace?
| doctoboggan wrote:
| No, non-fungi single celled organisms have existed at all times
| that fungi have existed on earth.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Blue-green algae have colonized fresh water and all moist
| spaces on the continents billions of years before the
| appearance of fungi and of the terrestrial green plants. They
| were accompanied by the ancestors of several groups of
| heterotrophic bacteria, e.g. Firmicutes and Actinobacteria (the
| Gram-positive bacteria), which had developed abilities like
| making spores that could survive dryness and be spread by wind,
| like also fungi would do later.
|
| In fact, it is likely that blue-green algae have appeared for
| the first time on continents, either in fresh water or moist
| rocks, and only much later they have spread into marine
| environments, which had been previously dominated by anoxygenic
| phototrophic bacteria, which were oxidizing sulfur, iron or
| manganese, not water. The transition to oxidizing water is
| likely to have been necessary for the spreading of the blue-
| green algae on continents, where the fresh water had only a
| very small content of substances that could be oxidized unlike
| seawater, which at that time was rich in hydrogen sulfide and
| in Fe(II) and Mn(II) ions. When the blue-green algae have
| expanded back into the oceans, that must have been after the
| oxygenation of the atmosphere has modified the composition of
| the oceans, by precipitating most of the iron and manganese and
| oxidizing sulfide to sulfate, which would have deprived the
| anoxygenic phototrophic bacteria of their food.
|
| Then, in the oceans, at some point in time a blue-green alga
| has become symbiotic with the ancestor of red algae and green
| algae, which have then dominated for many hundred million years
| the oceans, before the much later appearance of other
| phototrophic groups, like diatoms and brown algae.
| Multicellular red algae and green algae already existed in the
| oceans around one billion years ago, when no other
| multicellular eukaryotes existed.
|
| When the fungi have appeared through a transition to a
| terrestrial lifestyle, that could happen only if on land they
| could find great amounts of dead living matter, which had been
| produced by blue-green algae. It is not known for sure whether
| fungi have appeared a long time before the first terrestrial
| green plants or about the same time, but it seems that already
| for the most ancient terrestrial green plants, symbioses with
| fungi that enhanced the absorptive capabilities of their roots
| have been important. For aquatic plants, roots had only a
| fixation function, not the function of absorbing nutrients, so
| perhaps symbiosis with some already existing terrestrial fungi
| might have been necessary, not optional, for the first
| terrestrial green plants, until better absorbing roots have
| evolved.
|
| So for a long time in the history of the planet, the drier
| parts of the land would be barren, but wherever there was
| moisture you would find mats or crusts of blue-green algae,
| with associated heterotrophic bacteria and viruses.
|
| Then, probably not earlier than the Cambrian, there would be
| also fungi, and even later the first moss-like terrestrial
| green plants would appear.
| calibas wrote:
| > with eukarya containing all multicellular organisms within the
| four kingdoms of fungi, animals, plants and protists.
|
| This bugs me so much. The four-kingdom system should have died
| out decades ago, it's absurdly wrong. For one thing, fungi and
| animals should be together (opisthokonts) if you're dividing
| eukaryotes into the major groups. If you consider genetics,
| there's no such thing as "protists", they're just a whole bunch
| of small things that were grouped together because we didn't know
| otherwise.
|
| It's more like, Archaeplastida, Excavata, SAR supergroup,
| Amoebozoa, and Opisthokonta at the moment. The exact list is up
| for debate, and currently undergoing change. There's plenty of
| weird things like Hemimastigophora and we're not really sure
| where they fit yet.
| mmooss wrote:
| > The exact list is up for debate, and currently undergoing
| change.
|
| My strong impression is that even the roots of the tree are
| debated, with competing models that often change.
|
| > The four-kingdom system should have died out decades ago
|
| First, hopefully not! :) Second, I think it's used because it's
| the last stable model. Third, it's a model that the public can
| understand - theres no point in even trying to use
| "Archaeplastida, Excavata, SAR supergroup, Amoebozoa, and
| Opisthokonta" unless you are an expert in phylogenics or
| evolution. Who can understand and remember that?
| calibas wrote:
| Children can memorize all 50 US state capitals, they can
| memorize a handful of scientific names. If we really wanted
| to, we could teach them a much more accurate view of the tree
| of life. Also, I don't think the four-kingdom system has been
| taught in schools for a while? I went to high school in the
| late 90s and it wasn't taught then.
|
| It's strange to see people promoting it online in 2025. If
| adults want to remain ignorant, so be it, but at least teach
| children the truth. Let them know that life is incredibly
| complicated, it's a mystery we're still solving, and they
| could be the ones to help figure it out. Don't overly
| simplify things for small minds, it creates a false picture
| and it kills the imagination.
| neom wrote:
| May as well add this to the above:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songline (large amounts of
| knowledge can be transferred just fine)
| bbor wrote:
| I'm a huge cladistics fan, but insisting that "animal"
| isn't a useful term is pretty out there, IMHO. Certainly we
| can (and do!) teach cladistics in high school biology, but
| does your ideal world have baby books titled with one of
| the mentioned names...?
|
| More personally speaking: what am I missing out by using
| the four kingdoms? Like, how could that possibly ever
| backfire in a way that slightly impacts my life negatively,
| or impedes the scientists studying genetic lineages?
| There's basically infinite science to "remain ignorant" of,
| I don't see any justification for an elitist attitude on
| this nuance in particular.
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| Why not go the other way, what are you missing if you
| don't learnt four kingdoms. Why should that be taught at
| all.
|
| One obvious reason it should not be taught, if it is
| wrong then it kills curiosity and imagination by giving
| us a neat story we think is true. In a way it has the
| same negative effect religion can have but to a smaller
| degree. Why does the earth exist, because god made it
| kills all spirit of enquiry. This is the same problem I
| have with the big bang. This is another theory that kills
| inquiry. Similar example:
| 9dev wrote:
| Well in very practical terms, it gives you a way to name
| things you see in the forest, to figure out what is
| edible, and to understand what has a sentience of its
| own, similar to yours.
|
| I don't mean to be snarky, but it seems like you're very
| removed from the reality of normal people and parents out
| there.
| johnisgood wrote:
| There is much more to figure out what is edible and what
| is not. Considering shrooms alone, it is much more
| "complicated", so much that there are specialists for
| that, even, but I agree, could be an useful skill, but
| not for people who do not even leave the city, I think.
|
| However, they should know the basics such as "not eating
| potatoes (or its parts) that are green", and so forth,
| since that is something you run into even if you never
| leave the city. Food spoilage in general would be useful
| to teach, but that is the job of the parents, I would
| say. That said, my teachers in elementary school always
| used to tell me that they are our second parents. I can
| see where they were coming from.
| 9dev wrote:
| I didn't say there wasn't. My point is that explaining to
| kids why they can pick a strawberry from the forest
| floor, but leave the fly agaric where it is, despite
| being the same color, is hard enough without going into
| the phylogenetic peculiarities.
|
| Starting with animals (things that can think like you),
| plants (things that eat light), fungi (underground webs
| that bloom above ground), and bacteria (very small things
| that are sort-of alive, and can both be good for you or
| make you sick), makes things so much easier and is
| probably all you need to know for a while.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I agree.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| The reality of normal people and parents is that a
| different basic classification is warranted:
|
| - Humans are what they are;
|
| - Animals are what they are;
|
| - Plants and fungi of the kind you can gather in the
| forest, and anything else that is macro-scale but doesn't
| run or swim around, are just "plants";
|
| - Bacteria, viruses, fungi of the other kind, archaea and
| even single-cellular organisms that could have negative
| impact on you, are all just "bacteria" or
| "microorganisms" or "pathogens";
|
| - "Plants" breaks down into "trees", "grasses", "bushes",
| "shrooms", "flowers", and that's about it;
|
| - "Animals" breaks down into "fish", "reptiles", "birds",
| "mammals";
|
| That covers about all the biology regular people see, to
| the extent they care about.
|
| Now, if you're teaching people the biological
| categorization, any one you will pick will be different
| from the daily experience of an ordinary person. Like,
| for practical reasons, whales and dolphins are fish (they
| look like every other fish and swim in water, and you
| hunt them with ships), and tomato is a vegetable (you
| don't put it into a fruit salad), and all that looks like
| grass is grass (despite genetics telling that some
| grasses are really just very tiny trees, or some trees
| are genetically just really big grass, etc.).
|
| Point being, if you're going to teach them a biological
| categorization, that's already distinct from "normie
| everyday life" categorization, _so you may just as well
| pick one that 's current and useful in biology_.
|
| (And once again, this is another case of a non-issue that
| turns into issue only because people are unable to
| comprehend and teach the distinction between "is" and
| "can be thought of as"; the fact that categories are
| invented by people, are not facts of nature; that their
| only job is to be useful, and you can have many
| classification systems for the same thing, useful in
| different contexts.)
| quesera wrote:
| > _That covers about all the biology regular people see,
| to the extent they care about._
|
| Insects and spiders are feeling left out.
|
| That insects and mammals are both Animalia can be
| nonintuitive for preschoolers.
| calibas wrote:
| I'm not arguing that animal isn't a useful term, but if
| you're dividing eukaryotes into the major groups, it's
| not one of them.
|
| > More personally speaking: what am I missing out by
| using the four kingdoms? Like, how could that possibly
| ever backfire in a way that slightly impacts my life
| negatively, or impedes the scientists studying genetic
| lineages?
|
| Sure, where does kelp fit in? How about slime molds?
|
| Also, I'm not suggesting we teach children all the nuance
| of phylogeny. I'm suggesting we don't teach a version
| that we've proven to be objectively wrong.
|
| Eventually, the four-kingdoms system will go away, and it
| will sit next to the "animal, vegetable, mineral" system
| in the annals of scientific history.
| bbor wrote:
| Interesting, thanks for elaborating! Still not sure I
| understand sadly, but maybe it's just different
| worldviews on how to play language games. Like, you say
| we don't need to teach nuance, and that animal is a
| useful term -- but then what does it denote, if not a
| group of creatures?
|
| To me, this discussion should center around utility --
| "objectively wrong" is assumed to apply to basically
| everything we ever say on some level (what are the
| chances we happen to live at the End of Science?) so I
| hesitate to adopt such a binary framework. In this light,
| taking a stand against "animal, plant, fungus"--which
| sums up an overwhelming majority of how laypeople
| interact with the world--seems of dubious value.
|
| Re:examples, kelp are plants and slime molds are molds,
| and therefor fungi. Boom. Does that capture 100% of their
| characteristics on a genetic level? Presumably not (and
| TIL kelp are technically like flexible coral colonies,
| not vascular plants)! Is it more useful for 99.9% of
| usage than "they're their own things, somewhat unlike
| anything else"? Definitely, yes.
|
| P.s. animal vegetable mineral also seems to have held up
| okay...? It's a culinary thing AFAIK, not an exhaustive
| list of all objects.
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| I strongly disagree. It's necessary to teach oversimplified
| things to small minds, even oversimplified to the extent of
| being incorrect.
|
| It's unlikely you understand relativistic mechanics unless
| you learn and practice Newtonian for a few years, then many
| people stop there and never go for relativism.
|
| It's unlikely you understand Peano axioms without first
| spending years just working with numbers, completely
| disregarding the formal foundations. Then many people stop
| there and never study the formal math.
|
| It's unlikely you understand electron configurations and
| orbitals without first imagining electrons orbiting the
| nucleus like earth is orbiting the sun. And even that part
| you won't understand until you master the false concepts of
| "sunrise" and "sunset".
|
| You can't climb the ladder without stepping on the first
| step. I've been studying for many years, observing people
| around me, I also did a fair share of teaching myself. The
| purist approach that avoids oversimplifications inevitably
| leads to disaster. There are maybe 1-2 kids in the class
| who can "jump the ladder", the rest are left on the ground
| helpless and confused.
|
| Another curious observation: when I found myself in that
| role of a kid jumping the ladder in a purist class, I did
| that by secretly building a false ladder of my own. When
| professor said "Banach space" I would imagine Euclidean or
| Hilbert spaces and would get correct intuition half the
| time. The other half I would remember and use it to
| understand the difference. Most of others suffered dearly,
| unable to grasp anything at all, seeing the glass bead game
| instead of vectors and functions. And we were 20 years old
| back then, not even that small.
| blueflow wrote:
| It wouldn't be so nice if it was oversimplified and
| incorrect to the extent that the child realizes it
| doesn't add up.
| kulahan wrote:
| Thankfully at very young ages where this is required,
| that level of critical thinking is very far off
| kruffalon wrote:
| From my limited experience (being a child and raising one
| child) I would say that the problem is more that we (as
| adults) pretend that the simplified thing is the whole
| picture.
|
| Every time someone told me: "this is a simplified version
| to give you a basic understanding and later you will be
| able to learn more accurate versions" that was
| tremendously helpful and sometimes it sparked my
| curiosity and motivated me to look stuff up myself.
|
| I mean we should get ahead of the realisation that it
| doesn't add up.
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| I suspect that the best approach would be not to "get
| ahead", but rather see this realisation develop naturally
| and help it along the way. It's hard to get critical
| thinking if everything is already criticized before you
| even come.
|
| This can work with your kids though but I don't know if
| it can be effectively scaled to a school class. Maybe on
| a few dedicated play/discovery sessions, not on a regular
| basis.
| jon_richards wrote:
| When I moved to the US in 3rd grade, I was marked wrong
| for putting negative numbers as answers on a math test.
| The correct answer was "You can't subtract a larger
| number from a smaller number".
| macintux wrote:
| I got into an argument with my science teacher in 4th or
| 5th grade about whether rivers could flow north, because
| on a globe, north is up.
| mrWiz wrote:
| I had a similar experience, but was fortunate that the
| teacher took me aside and explained that I was right but
| they were teaching a simplified version. In hindsight
| that was really a helpful approach.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Doing this would create a nice opportunity to teach the
| right and wrong ways to move the needle in scientific
| discourse (e.g. don't start by holding a press conference
| about cold fusion).
|
| Graduation could mean an overthrowing of the known-wrong
| models. Congratulations, here are the next known-wrong
| models. Now prove _these_ wrong.
| card_zero wrote:
| I'm torn on this one, because there's no way I can accept
| "lies-to-children are for their own good", but on the
| other hand I'd hate to be overburdened with information
| about Peanut maximums or the Ophthalmic supergroup when
| all I wanted to know was how to do division or what kind
| of thing a mushroom is.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's not hard. "It's sort of like that, but the details
| are complicated and you'll learn them later if you want"
| is a perfectly fine answer.
|
| A big difference between a lie and a simplification is
| whether the other party _knows_ it 's a simplification.
| Communicating that is independent of specific
| simplification you use, and it's sometimes as easy as
| saying "is mostly like" / "sorta" instead of "is".
| mlhpdx wrote:
| I was learned enough in school to know when teachers were
| "teaching" something oversimplified. They uniformly
| acknowledged that when asked, until one didn't. That one
| didn't care about the nuance and insisted I give the
| "expected" answer when asked and ruined my attitude in
| school for years (not the only event, but it didn't
| help). Obviously I've never forgotten her.
|
| One thing I adore about this community is the broad
| acceptance of "I don't know" and "it depends" as the
| starting point for answers.
| yencabulator wrote:
| To bring that back into the tech/business world:
|
| My personal rule for being an expert/consultant is to be
| very willing to say "I don't know, but I can find that
| out for you", and define _that_ as my real expertise:
| know how to find out things.
|
| Technology stacks, programming languages, all of those
| things come and go. The skill to pick up whatever is
| needed is long-term better.
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| Once you accept that a model of reality is always
| somewhat incorrect you kind of stop seeing this as
| "lies". Reality is infinitely complex, a model however is
| finite and therefore understandable.
|
| We value models for their simplicity, for their ability
| to disregard secondary and tertiary details to allow
| comprehension and prediction of primary effects.
|
| Then the only question is: which level of the
| simplicity/correctness trade-off is appropriate in given
| circumstances? When teaching kids or even a non-
| professional adults, the appropriate level is often very
| heavy on the "simplicity" side. Adding more complexity
| results in less overall understanding, so a net-negative
| effect in the end.
| Tostino wrote:
| I think the problem comes in when you have adults
| teaching kids a simplified model who don't actually
| understand that is what they are doing.
|
| It is not always conveyed well that they are learning a
| simplified model, or using an analogy. That's when kids
| feel lied to.
| MyOutfitIsVague wrote:
| There are very many pithy sayings to this effect, most
| famously "All models are wrong, but some are useful"
| (perhaps by George Box, but I can't find this exact
| phrase attributed to him)
|
| Even Von Neumann said "truth is much too complicated to
| allow anything but approximations."
| ttw44 wrote:
| I love your point that avoiding oversimplifications leads
| to disaster. It explains why I struggle to have a purist
| mindset while also unable to explain why things go poorly
| sometimes.
| MITSardine wrote:
| To be fair, "functional analysis is infinite dimensional
| linear algebra" is a saying for a reason, that's an
| intuition a good professor should have given you. Mine
| gave me it so well, I still see no difference between R^n
| and a Hilbert space! (on the dangers of intuitions)
|
| This reminds me of a short lived stretch in French
| mathematical education, the "Bourbaki years". For those
| unaware, Nicolas Bourbaki was "a dozen mathematicians in
| a trench coat" who, in the early 20th, reformed
| mathematics from the ground up, their work is notoriously
| opaque (to some, perhaps a revelation to others), if
| rigorous. It served as inspiration for ambitious
| mathematics education reforms in the 60s and 70s.
|
| Some of the things my father had to contend with:
|
| - naive set theory and non-10 basis arithmetic in primary
| school (age 7)
|
| - set theory in early middle school (ages 10/11), maps
| over sets, so I imagine things like injectivity and
| bijections. "[...] a different approach of arithmetic,
| computations often replaced by a more abstract
| theoretical approach": I wonder how that went in the
| classroom
|
| - general Algebra introduced at 15yo, groups, rings,
| fields, vector spaces; 16yo mostly linear algebra (vector
| spaces, linear mappings etc; in true French fashion I'll
| bet they didn't see many 2x2 or 3x3 matrices that year)
|
| I'm quoting Wikipedia "Mathematiques modernes" here, my
| father only told me of the last point himself. Though I
| do have his notebooks from early higher ed, they had
| general topology before metric space topology, for
| example, in year 1 or 2 (probably 1, because how can you
| do anything before you know topology...). It was all like
| this, a theory that builds on itself and you can't skip
| any steps. A finite dimensional space is a particular
| case of an infinite dimensional one, so you start with
| the latter. Backwards from how things were constructed
| and are understood by people.
|
| The fact these reforms survived about 10 years and have
| been completely reverted is testament that this approach
| probably doesn't work.
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| > To be fair, "functional analysis is infinite
| dimensional linear algebra" is a saying for a reason,
| that's an intuition a good professor should have given
| you. Mine gave me it so well, I still see no difference
| between R^n and a Hilbert space! (on the dangers of
| intuitions)
|
| That's the thing: not only he didn't share this
| intuition, he actively prohibited people from bringing it
| up in the class because it can lead to mistakes.
|
| The program was to start with most generic cases (Banach
| spaces, metric spaces) and prove whatever is provable
| there, then continue adding assumptions one by one and
| proving stronger and stronger theorems. I think we've
| reached Hilbert spaces by the end of the year and that
| was a gotcha moment for many students (wait, these
| vectors were functions the whole time?), but it was too
| late. Everyone failed miserably at proving or
| understanding all the preceding theorems because without
| the intuition it turns into a game of symbols with no
| structure or hope. The only recourse were those bootleg
| analogies from finite spaces and Fourier analysis that a
| few students knew or came up with.
|
| The "New Math" you mention above gives a good frame of
| reference. A beautiful curriculum that's almost
| impossible to understand unless you already learned math
| the normal way -- a formally incorrect and inconsistent
| but reliable way.
|
| I also made similar mistake myself when I tried to teach
| the C language to 12 y.o kids without saying the dreaded
| "just write it like that, you'll understand later". That
| experiment failed completely but I only understood why
| two years later when I myself was subjected to the
| functional analysis course. Or I think the complete
| realization came to me even later, with the C language
| experiment and the functional analysis story becoming
| pieces of the same puzzle.
| tremon wrote:
| _It 's necessary to teach oversimplified things to small
| minds, even oversimplified to the extent of being
| incorrect._
|
| Please get off your elitist horse. "Small minds" has
| nothing to do with it, it is mostly a matter of topic
| specialization. You even acknowledge this yourself in the
| next few paragraphs.
|
| Also, as attested by another current front page story
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43470138), it's
| incorrect even when talking about children.
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| What's your point then?
|
| All minds alike, big and small, benefit from
| simplification. I was replying to a comment that
| specifically referenced "small minds", that's all.
| teleforce wrote:
| > If adults want to remain ignorant, so be it, but at least
| teach children the truth. Let them know that life is
| incredibly complicated, it's a mystery we're still solving,
| and they could be the ones to help figure it out. Don't
| overly simplify things for small minds, it creates a false
| picture and it kills the imagination.
|
| Yes we should have this firm stance and accept nothing less
| especially when it come to something fundamental such as
| the Theory of Evolution. It's a shame that some scientists
| are even promoting that human come from monkey while the
| fact that from Darwin own observation was that monkey and
| human probably share the same ancestor not human come from
| monkey and even that's debatable. They even create a false
| picture that now become a "universal truth" printed on
| people shirts and kind of accepted as truth as far as
| layman and kids are concerned [1]. But now even the one
| making the picture is regretting it but the damaged has
| already been done. Einstein once mentioned "Everything
| should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler". By
| making things simpler than simpler (pun intended), we are
| creating distortion and falsehood that can take years and
| perhaps centuries to be fixed, and just ask the "flat
| earth" crowd.
|
| [1] On the Origins of "The March of Progress":
|
| https://sites.wustl.edu/prosper/on-the-origins-of-the-
| march-...
| ivell wrote:
| People gain understanding when we relate things to their
| frame of reference. Kids have very limited life experience
| and their frame of reference is very low. Introducing new
| concepts that are not relatable would create huge gaps in
| real understanding.
|
| For example, explaining encryption as a lock to prevent
| thieves from stealing data is much more understandable to
| kids than going into actual definition of encryption. Lock
| is something concrete that they have seen, while encryption
| is an abstract concept hard to grasp.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Except encryption is nothing like a lock, and "stealing
| data" is a problematic term, as it's stretching the
| concept of theft way past its common meaning - it's using
| the term "stealing" in the exact same way people saying
| "software piracy is stealing" are. So that's already
| providing completely twisted mental model to kids. And it
| stems in big part from trying to pass one specific
| application as an answer to what the thing is.
|
| (What is a car? It's like extra legs for your butt, that
| can run very fast and carry multiple butts.)
|
| You can get much closer to the truth by explaining
| encryption as a trick to make words understandable only
| to those who know the trick. You can play a substitution
| game with your kids, explain how you and them could agree
| that when one says "snake" it means "I", etc. and so
| "snake eats green grass" means "I am very hungry", and
| that you'll understand them but no one else will, etc.
|
| At any given age, kids are as likely to understand
| secrecy as they're to understand why locks exist, so it's
| really just a choice of not using a bad and confusing
| analogy.
| ivell wrote:
| Substitution is a new concept for kids. Not something
| they can readily understand. So you need to explain that
| in terms of a game. Kids know what secrets are. But from
| their point of view, why even talk about it if it is
| secret? Why can't we go to another place and talk
| secretly? Why do we need to talk secrets in public using
| substitution? Since they do not see obvious need for it
| in their daily life and there are workarounds for it,
| they do not get why there is a need for substitution.
|
| By the time we explain all these to them, they would have
| already lost interest, or context and would easily forget
| the whole thing.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Kids know what secrets are. But from their point of
| view, why even talk about it if it is secret? Why can 't
| we go to another place and talk secretly? Why do we need
| to talk secrets in public using substitution?_
|
| Connect this to surprise gifts and birthday invites. Or
| another thing that resonates with them.
|
| Explaining locks and their purpose ain't any easier. Just
| yesterday, my daughter asked me why I'm locking the extra
| set of doors we're normally keeping open, and when I told
| her about the just-issued warning about burglaries in our
| area, well, there's a lot of context to explain before a
| 5yo gets why locking the doors is the right thing to do
| in this scenario.
|
| I mean, there's always a lot of explaining to do with
| kids anyway. So far, I've never had trouble giving them
| real explanations and letting them know when they're
| simplified.
| mlhpdx wrote:
| > Substitution is a new concept for kids.
|
| Children learn substitution with language. Hand signs and
| words are substituted for the objects, feelings and
| actions they know inherently. It's tempting to apply
| adult context on children but it's a mistake.
| Izkata wrote:
| Encryption might not even need much any explanation, just
| using familiar terms: kids come up with "secret
| languages" all the time between friends and siblings.
| wegfawefgawefg wrote:
| went to school till 2012, highly esteemed US high school,
| was still taught then
| dvdkon wrote:
| The four kingdoms system is taught because it is useful;
| not for science, but for everyday communication.
|
| We use a similarly flawed model every day: fruit and
| vegetables. What's in one group or the other is based on
| vague similarities and is mostly arbitrary, but it's still
| useful to split the huge category of "edible plant parts"
| into more manageable chunks.
|
| Anyone familiar with apples and pears will likely see an
| orange and say it's a fruit. Likewise anyone familiar with
| cats and dogs will see a boar and think "animal", not
| "plant" or "fungus". A genetics-based assessment would be
| more "correct", yes, but impossible on a walk or in the
| store.
|
| Primary school teachers, from my experience, have a
| tendency to present things as " _the_ truth " and accept no
| deviation from their own word. I think changing that would
| be a good step in fostering creativity in children, much
| more than skipping less-accurate models.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > We use a similarly flawed model every day: fruit and
| vegetables. What's in one group or the other is based on
| vague similarities and is mostly arbitrary, but it's
| still useful to split the huge category of "edible plant
| parts" into more manageable chunks.
|
| This is completely wrong. Those categories aren't any
| smaller, in a practical sense, than the combined category
| "plants". The gain in manageability is zero.
|
| The reason we divide the categories that way is that we
| put them to different purposes, not that they'd be too
| large if combined.
| mapt wrote:
| But... but... every cell has one spherical nucleus, one
| spherical chloroplast for plants or spherical mitochondria
| for animals, and a host of other features depicted in this
| helpful diagram that you're going to have to copy from
| memory.
| exe34 wrote:
| > it creates a false picture and it kills the imagination.
|
| this reminds me of a certain voting population that think
| male and female are very simple XY and XX things and
| nothing else exists.
|
| unfortunately a lot of people take dumbed down models and
| mistake the map for the terrain.
|
| I'm not sure there's a cure for it - I have cousins who
| went through the same schooling and came out with very
| different abilities to generalise.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Would you also propose we skip over the Bohr model of the
| atom and teach Schrodinger to ten year olds?
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| >>Don't overly simplify things for small minds, it creates
| a false picture and it kills the imagination.
|
| I think we can all agree that in pedagogy and teaching, you
| have to start simplified; then it becomes a more productive
| discussion on what constitutes _over_ simplifying, rather
| than a binary "do or do not over simplify". We can and
| absolutely should be open about complexity of the world,
| but at the same time be aware that average person goes
| through between 8 and 16 years of education (with important
| outliers on either side of the bell curve), and trying to
| fit all complexity and all the knowledge on day one
| generally does not lead to productive results.
|
| The first lesson of the biology in this area I think is not
| so much "there are these and precisely these 4 or 7 or 9
| fixed and immutable categories of life", but... "life can
| be categorized, and living creatures that look different
| actually have similarities". There's wonder, and insight,
| and enlightenment right there that's probably going to
| stick longer for vast vast vast majority of people, than
| the specifics of whether there were 4 or 7 or 9 categories.
| Heck, we changed number of planets and our understanding of
| "planet" remained the same :).
| mjan22640 wrote:
| > Who can understand and remember that?
|
| Anybody who is interested in it
| f1shy wrote:
| At which point started to be important in science that
| "public can understand"? I think if something is a better
| explanation for the reality, we ahould go for it, even if it
| is difficult for the public.
|
| Disclaimer: in this case I have absolutely no idea what is
| better. But the rationale seems wrong.
| mmooss wrote:
| We can and, IMHO, should do both. Scientists explaining
| physical realities, such as gravity, don't use advanced
| mathematics - it would be pointless.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Yes I agree. 4 humors were enough for medieval europe,
| they're good enough for me!! Who can remember all this
| complicated 'germ theory of disease' liberal junk?! There
| must be _hundreds_ of these supposed 'germs' out there! No
| sir, no thank you!
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| And then there are viruses, which don't show up on the tree of
| life at all because there's no consensus that they even
| constitute "life."
| Ultimatt wrote:
| Pretty sure anyone who knows anything about viruses would say
| they are alive. Or at least as alive as parasitic nano
| archaea with genomes smaller than the viruses living right
| next to them... The philosophical way to look at it is humans
| aren't alive in the space between planets they live inside
| these little hard shells, then when they get to a planet they
| go wild using all the other resources around them made of
| biomass. Viruses are just this, their biome isn't the wider
| one you participate in instead they are sub-cellular life, in
| the same way you are sub-planetary life. Humans don't make
| the oxygen atmosphere on the planet themselves, they
| parasitize this feature of planets from other life. In the
| same way viruses use cellular machinery.
| beeflet wrote:
| If humans create oxygen with a machine, is that parasitic?
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| > Pretty sure anyone who knows anything about viruses would
| say they are alive
|
| Whilst I don't doubt that, viruses don't abide by typical
| definitions of life that would include self-replication.
| Obviously, they do replicate, but not by themselves.
| btilly wrote:
| Men like me also don't replicate by ourselves. Does that
| mean that we are not alive?
| Izkata wrote:
| I thought "has a metabolism" (consumes food and produces
| waste) was the one viruses didn't fit with.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| This guy agrees with you:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgS1Lwr8gq8
| GioM wrote:
| I feel like what trips people up is the abstraction layer.
|
| Viruses are abstracted on top of other living things in the
| same way that animals are abstracted on top of plants, in
| that they both require the lower layer of abstraction for
| their basic survival.
| renewiltord wrote:
| One of the great wonders of clustering algorithms is that no
| matter what k > n you choose, you can construct k clusters.
| Then we can argue about the clusters and about k. It is said
| that when Humanity discovers the One True K, the taxonomy will
| disappear and be replaced by a different one.
| boxed wrote:
| From what I've gathered it's been pretty clear for a while now
| that archea is basal to eucarya, meaning humans are archea.
| adrian_b wrote:
| When classifying living beings, a single classification
| criterion is not good enough.
|
| One classification criterion is descendance from a common
| ancestor, i.e. cladistic classification.
|
| In many cases this is the most useful classification criterion,
| because the living beings grouped in a class defined by having
| a common ancestor share a lot of characteristics inherited from
| their common ancestor, so when using a name that is applied to
| that class of living beings, the name provides a lot of
| information about any member.
|
| However there are at least 2 reasons which complicate such a
| cladistic classification.
|
| One is that the graph of the evolution of living beings is not
| strictly a tree, because there are hybridization events that
| merge branches.
|
| Sometimes the branches that are merged are closely related,
| e.g. between different species of felids, so they do not change
| the overall aspect of the tree. However there are also merges
| between extremely distant branches, like the symbiosis event
| between some blue-green alga (Cyanobacteria) and some
| unicellular eukaryote, which has created the ancestors of all
| eukaryotes that are oxygenic phototrophs, including the green
| plants.
|
| Moreover, there have been additional symbiosis events that have
| merged additional eukaryote branches and which have created the
| ancestors of other eukaryote phototrophs, e.g. the ancestor of
| brown algae.
|
| After any such hybridization event, there is the question how
| you should classify the descendants of the hybrid ancestor, as
| belonging to one branch or to the other branch that have been
| merged.
|
| For some purposes it is more useful to classify all eukaryote
| phototrophs based on the branch that has provided the main
| nucleus of the hybrid cell, and this is the most frequently
| used classification.
|
| For other purposes it is more useful to group together all the
| living beings that are oxygenic phototrophs, including various
| kinds of eukaryotes and also the blue-green algae, and divide
| them based on the evolution tree of their light-capturing
| organelles, i.e. the chloroplasts.
|
| This is also a valid cladistic classification, because all
| oxygenic phototrophs, both eukaryotes and prokaryotes, are the
| descendants of a single common ancestor, some ancient
| phototrophic bacteria that has switched from oxidizing
| manganese using light energy, to oxidizing water, which
| releases free dioxygen.
|
| Even when there are no branch merges due to hybridization,
| there remains the problem that in the set of descendants from a
| single ancestor there are some that are conservative, so they
| still resemble a lot with their ancestor, and some that are
| progressive, which may have changed a lot, so they no longer
| resemble with their ancestor.
|
| In this case, using the name of the entire group provides very
| little information, because most characteristics that were
| valid for the ancestor may be completely inapplicable to the
| subgroups that have become different. In such a case, defining
| and using a name for the paraphiletic set of subgroups that
| remains after excluding the subgroups that have evolved
| divergently may be more useful in practice than using only
| names based on a cladistic classification. For instance the use
| of the word "fish" with its traditional paraphiletic meaning,
| i.e. "vertebrate that is not a tetrapod", is very useful and
| including tetrapods in "fishes" is stupid, because that would
| make "fish" and "vertebrate" synonymous and it would require
| the frequent use of the expression "fishes that are not
| tetrapods", whenever something is said that is correct only for
| vertebrates that are not tetrapods, or of the expression "bony
| fishes that are not tetrapods", for things valid for bony
| fishes, but not for tetrapods.
|
| While in many contexts it is very useful to know that both
| fungi and animals are opisthokonts, and there are a few facts
| that apply to all opisthokonts, regardless whether they are
| fungi, animals or other opisthokonts more closely related to
| fungi or more closely related to animals, the number of cases
| when it is much more important to distinguish fungi from
| animals is much greater than the number of cases when their
| common ancestry is relevant.
|
| Animals are multicellular eukaryotes that have retained the
| primitive lifestyle of the eukaryotes, i.e. feeding by
| ingesting other living beings, which is made possible by cell
| motility.
|
| Fungi are multicellular eukaryotes that have abandoned the
| primitive lifestyle of the eukaryotes, and which have reverted
| to a lifestyle similar to that of heterotrophic bacteria, just
| with a different topology of the interface between cells and
| environment (i.e. with a branched multicellular mycelium
| instead of multiple small separate cells).
|
| This change in lifestyle has been caused by the transition to a
| terrestrial life, which has been accomplished with a thick cell
| wall (of chitin) for avoiding dehydration, which has suppressed
| cell motility, making impossible the ingestion of other living
| beings, the same as for bacteria. Moreover the transition to a
| bacterial lifestyle has also been enabled by several lateral
| gene transfers from some bacteria, which have provided some
| additional metabolic pathways that enable fungi to survive when
| feeding with simpler substances than required by most
| eukaryotes, including animals.
|
| So even from a cladistic point of view, fungi have some
| additional bacterial ancestors for their DNA, besides the
| common opisthokont ancestor that they share with the animals.
|
| Animals are unique among eukaryotes, because all other
| multicellular eukaryotes have abandoned the primitive lifestyle
| of eukaryotes, by taking the lifestyles of either heterotrophic
| or phototrophic bacteria. However for both other kinds of
| lifestyle changes there are multiple examples, i.e. besides
| true fungi that are opisthokonts there are several other groups
| of fungous eukaryotes that are not opisthokonts, the best known
| being the Oomycetes. There are also bacteria with fungal
| lifestyle and topology, e.g. actinomycetes a.k.a.
| Actinobacteria.
|
| If we will ever explore other planets with life, those living
| beings will not have a common ancestor with the living beings
| from our planet, but nevertheless it will still be possible to
| classify them based on their lifestyle in about a half of dozen
| groups that would be analogous to animals (multicellular living
| beings that feed by ingestion, so they must be mobile or they
| must have at least some mobile parts), fungi (multicellular
| beings that grow into their food, absorbing it after external
| digestion), oxygenic phototrophs, anoxygenic phototrophs,
| chemoautotrophs, unicellular equivalents of animals and fungi,
| like protozoa and heterotrophic bacteria, viruses.
|
| These differences in lifestyles are more important in most
| contexts than the descendance from a common ancestor.
|
| So while it is useful to have the name Opisthokonta for the
| contexts where fungi and animals and their close relatives must
| be included, it is much more frequent to need to speak
| separately about fungi and other fungous organisms on one hand,
| and animals on the other hand.
|
| I agree that the term "kingdom" is obsolete when used in the
| context of a cladistic classification of the living beings.
|
| Perhaps it should be retained for a non-cladistic
| classification of the living beings, based on the few
| fundamental lifestyles that are possible, and which would
| remain valid even for extraterrestrial living beings.
| danmur wrote:
| Glad to see diamond inheritance being a problem in other
| fields
| bregma wrote:
| They should rewrite biology in Rust.
| timeon wrote:
| Just to stay on topic, Rust Language was named after
| fungus. "over-engineered for survival"
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's not a problem, it's a feature.
|
| Or rather, it's only a problem when you insist on rigid
| perspective that makes it a problem.
|
| (The real problem is that so many people insist on viewing
| things as trees, when their natural shape is directed
| graph.)
| Ultimatt wrote:
| I dunno you can mostly solve for this, look at the majority
| share of the genome in a compartment with a single membrane
| contained by the outer membrane (by definition for
| endosymbiogenesis), with the DNA molecules containing the
| highest quantity of coding gene content. That's the thing you
| do the cladistic descent on. Just because I'm carrying a load
| of bacterial symbionts that are better at digesting wheat
| doesn't make me a different species to humans who mostly eat
| rice. That I eventually carry those as an endosymbiont then
| eventually just a sack of genes doesn't really change who'
| was the boss in this situation, or who I'm able to reproduce
| with that entire time as a species either. Symbiogenesis is
| very much like this, look at Hatena arenicola if you want to
| see this emerging to see how it interacts with descent. This
| is really the difference between understanding reproductive
| relationships specifically, vs wider ecology. I agree that
| symbiogenesis is like this weird one where its both only
| going to happen through other ecological relationships and
| then reproduction. But there really is a clear cut time one
| turns into the other, with the fate of one of those organisms
| of the combination "winning" even though profoundly altered.
| Symbiodinium is probably another good example, it has loads
| of ecological partners and little remnants of all of those
| histories in its genetic material and organelle arrangement.
| But its still an obvious species, with all the other oddball
| dinoflagellates that act and look like it also appearing to
| have some common descent from something much simpler and
| eukaryotic.
|
| As a programmer symbiogenesis is a mixin or interface not a
| class.
| adrian_b wrote:
| It is not that simple, because a large part of the genes
| that originally belonged to the mitochondria or to the
| chloroplasts have been transferred into the nucleus and
| they are now completely integrated into it, even if
| evolution trees will show that those genes have a different
| history than the remainder of the nucleus.
|
| So even if you want to use only the DNA inside the nucleus
| for a cladistic classification, that does not produce a
| tree of evolution, but only a directed graph of genetic
| information flows, with many important hybridization
| events. While initially mitochondria and chloroplasts were
| just symbionts, like the useful bacteria in the human gut,
| eventually that symbiosis has become a full hybridization,
| with mixing and integration of the genetic information.
|
| The official cladistic classification produces a tree from
| the directed graph of the evolution by cutting the branches
| that are considered to be less important.
|
| Sometimes this is indeed the best choice, but there are
| contexts in which the genetic information brought through
| the minor branches is actually that which determines most
| of the importance of an organism in an ecosystem.
|
| E.g. in many contexts the most important feature of a
| living being is whether it is an oxygenic phototroph due to
| inheriting genetic information from some blue-green algae,
| i.e. that it is a primary producer in the ecosystem, and
| not the features that depend on which is the exact
| eukaryotic group from which most of its nucleus has been
| inherited. For instance, it is more frequently useful to
| group together brown algae with red algae (whose
| chloroplasts share a common ancestor), than to group brown
| algae with some non-phototrophic stramenopiles (which share
| a common ancestor for most of the nuclear DNA), with which
| they share only inherited characters that need an electron
| microscope for detection.
| someone7x wrote:
| As an unscientific layperson this was a riveting analysis,
| thanks for interesting reading.
| mmooss wrote:
| > All life on Earth is classified within three domains --
| bacteria, archaea and eukarya -- with eukarya containing all
| multicellular organisms
|
| Single cell eukaryotes also exist. Is it strictly true that there
| are no multicellular prokaryotes (what they call bacteria) or
| archaea? No exceptions at all?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Single cell eukaryotes also exist.
|
| Yes, "with eukarya containing all multicellular organisms" does
| not mean "all eukarya are multicellular organisms" it means
| "multicellular organisms are a subset of eukarya".
|
| > Is it strictly true that there are no multicellular
| prokaryotes (what they call bacteria) or archaea?
|
| First off, "prokaryotes (what they call bacteria)" is
| incorrect. Both archaea and bacteria, in the three-domain model
| referenced in the article, are prokaryotes.
|
| Second, correct, everything understood as a multicellular
| organism -- as distinct from colonies of unicellular organisms
| -- is composed of cells with nuclei, classified in eukarya in
| the three-domain model.
|
| (There is a newer proposed two-domain model which disposes with
| Eukarya as a top-level domain, folding it under Archaea; in
| that model, clearly, there are multicellular Archaea.)
| mmooss wrote:
| > Both archaea and bacteria, in the three-domain model
| referenced in the article, are prokaryotes.
|
| I suppose it depends on which model you use, and as discussed
| they seem to vary and be in flux right now, but the three
| domain model I learned was prokaryotes, archaea, and
| eukaryotes - the first two being different domains.
|
| > Yes, "with eukarya containing all multicellular organisms"
| does not mean "all eukarya are multicellular organisms" it
| means "multicellular organisms are a subset of eukarya".
|
| We agree. I don't grasp your point?
| xdavidliu wrote:
| > We agree. I don't grasp your point?
|
| your original comment didn't refute the quote, but one
| needs to squint hard to see that you didn't refute it.
| mmooss wrote:
| I wasn't trying to refute it; I was adding information:
| The quote didn't mention or imply that there are also
| single-cell eukaryotes, so I added that detail.
|
| Not everything is an argument or attack.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Cyanobacteria are an example of prokaryotes that, while not
| truly multicellular, may at times exhibit similar behavior.
|
| They can form colonies and, within groups that share walls,
| specialize into different functions such as photosynthesis or
| nitrogen fixing behavior. This enables the colony to adapt to
| changing conditions that, while still made up of individual
| organisms, collectively appear to function similarly to a
| single multicellular one.
|
| With that said, there aren't any examples of truly
| multicellular organisms within either domain. Just as an ant
| colony is not a single organism, cyanobacteria colony
| specializations are not examples of organs.
| danwills wrote:
| I think prokaryotic bacteria can form biofilms which seems like
| one step on the road to multicellularity, but that's more like
| a community, and iiuc most biofilms these days at least contain
| eukaryotic yeasts. I don't know of any actually-properly-
| multicellular prokaryotes, but maybe I need to read up?
| BrenBarn wrote:
| > Upon examining the internal structure of the fossilized
| Prototaxites, the researchers found that its interior was made up
| of a series of tubes
|
| Who knew the internet evolved millions of years ago?
| exe34 wrote:
| I love the idea that fungi house the Polises of Greg Egan.
| culi wrote:
| it's called the wood wide web (seriously)
| ddejohn wrote:
| Scientists are so adorable
| bbor wrote:
| I saw this on bsky a few days ago and was fascinated, so glad to
| see it made its way here! I had this question that went
| unanswered, so hopefully there's some experts/fellow musers here:
|
| _Why grow up if you don 't need photosynthesis?_
|
| From my perusal of The Literature (AKA an amazing Wikipedia
| article + the paper discussed in this link), we have a few strong
| theories about the prototaxites:
|
| 1. They fed off decaying matter in the soil through a vast
| network of mycelia/roots, and didn't photosynthesize.
|
| 2. They grew large, trunk-like protrusions, but without any
| branches or leaves (that were fossilized, at least). Like, way,
| _way_ taller than the bugs, moss, and short weird proto-grass
| around at the time.
|
| 3. These protrusions were regularly burrowed into by
| aforementioned bugs, which surely was a major health risk.
|
| 4. Even before this analysis, they've always been something of an
| oddball compared to contemporary life -- so everything's on the
| table, so to speak.
|
| Given those facts, I'm pretty stumped as to what evolutionary
| pressures might have driven them to grow upwards. At first I
| considered spore (seed?) dispersal, but mushrooms seem to get
| along just fine without towering above everything else, and I
| don't think wind speeds were way lower or anything. Anyone here
| have any better guesses?
| clort wrote:
| When you feed off decaying matter, hosting a colony of bugs
| which go out daily, bring back food and leave waste all around
| your environment sounds like a pretty good strategy when you
| don't have any way to move to better pastures?
| boxed wrote:
| Isn't this a long time before insects and such though?
| anentropic wrote:
| Wikipedia says:
|
| "evidence of arthropod boreholes in Prototaxites has been
| found from the early and late Devonian, suggesting the
| organism survived the stress of boring for many millions of
| years.[30] Intriguingly, boreholes appeared in Prototaxites
| long before plants developed a structurally equivalent
| woody stem, and it is possible that the borers transferred
| to plants when these evolved"
|
| and for Arthropods:
|
| "The evolutionary ancestry of arthropods dates back to the
| Cambrian period."
|
| which is about 100 million years before the Devonian
|
| also:
|
| "The oldest known arachnid is the trigonotarbid
| Palaeotarbus jerami, from about 420 million years ago in
| the Silurian period.[82][Note 3] Attercopus fimbriunguis,
| from 386 million years ago in the Devonian period, bears
| the earliest known silk-producing spigots"
|
| so there could have been all sorts of weird and wonderful
| bugs burrowing into Prototaxites I guess
| dwroberts wrote:
| One reason to grow upward is also just the need for oxygen.
| Mushrooms do this too - they tend to colonise and begin to
| fruit in high CO2 concentrations, but eventually want to escape
| it. And you can see the negative side effects of not being able
| to do this in mushrooms too (if the CO2 is too intense they
| grow too fast relative to their thickness [trying to reach air]
| and become nasty and stringy looking)
| gg80 wrote:
| If I remember correctly, there was this hypothesis that these
| things were covered by symbiotic algae so the idea is that they
| grew tall to increase the photosynthesis of their symbiotic
| organism (so kind of a giant lichen). But I can't find the
| source anymore, and I think that there isn't much evidence of
| any photobiont.
| baalimago wrote:
| I wonder what it tastes like
| intsunny wrote:
| The article about the study writes: `The study has not yet been
| peer-reviewed.`
|
| We should just stop reading the article then and there. This is a
| major method of how a single study can perpetuate fake science
| and fake news.
| verisimi wrote:
| > This is a major method of how a single study can perpetuate
| fake science and fake news.
|
| It's a feature, not a bug.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Clickbait is a bug tagged with WON'T FIX
| jfengel wrote:
| We should, but we don't.
|
| People want the news _now_. They don 't want to wait for it to
| be peer reviewed, or even cursorily checked. There is an
| infinite maw for information, and it has already consumed every
| single known fact.
|
| If you want science, you'll wait a month, because it's not
| actually urgent. These species waited hundreds of millions of
| years and it'll still be there in a few weeks.
|
| If you want entertainment, you want it right this instant. And
| that's what LiveScience exists to do.
|
| So you really should have stopped reading as soon as you saw
| the URL.
| countWSS wrote:
| Perhaps its a Ediacaran biota remnant, that had very diverse
| groups some of which could be misclassified because the consensus
| is against Ediacaran relics existing past their period.
| neuroelectron wrote:
| It's likely simply a fungus that used lignin instead of chitin.
| It went instinct when fungus learned to attack lignin.
| hydrogen7800 wrote:
| Discussions about classifying the domains of life aside, this
| article implies that there was, or could have been entire domains
| that are now extinct. Is this the case?
| andrewflnr wrote:
| That's really hard to answer without tackling the
| classification question head on. Do you mean groups that "would
| have" been considered a domain if humans had been around at the
| time? Or groups that are in some sense different from other
| domains to the same degree those domains are from each other?
|
| Whether we tag something as a domain also depends on its
| abundance and/or visibility. I bet if you take dug into
| microorganisms, you'd find tons that are as different from
| plants and animals as plants and animals are fun each other.
| But they all tend to get lumped in as "protists" or something
| because... we kinda don't care. I wouldn't be surprised if we
| somehow found out there were a lot of extinct critters in
| equivalent situations.
| hydrogen7800 wrote:
| In my draft reply, I was going to add "is this even the right
| question", meaning "is the taxonomy more of a human construct
| than a natural one". It seems the answer is yes.
|
| >Or groups that are in some sense different from other
| domains to the same degree those domains are from each other?
|
| This.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| I'm not a biologist, and especially not a microbiologist,
| so you should take what I say with a decent chunk of salt.
| That said, microbes are so wildly diverse that that version
| of the question sounds a lot like "are there any big
| extinct clades of microbes", which, I don't know, microbes
| are pretty persistent. But probably.
|
| As for macroscopic life, there are some Ediacaran critters
| like rangeomorphs and tribrachidium that (to my knowledge)
| are not conclusively associated with any existing domain.
| So who knows about those guys.
| tremon wrote:
| Depends on how wide your definition on "domain" is. Most of the
| dinosaur lineages have gone extinct, it's not too wild an
| assumption to assume the same is true for entire lineages of
| other species. So the safe answer to your question is
| "probably, yes".
| damnitbuilds wrote:
| You never did like my mother.
| riwsky wrote:
| Oh, that? That's just Bob. He helps out around the busy season
| sometimes. Didn't know this much about his family, though--neat!
| roughly wrote:
| Acknowledging this is a pre-print, but it is _wild_ that we can
| do this kind of analysis on a species that went extinct nearly a
| third of a billion years before the first hominids emerged. Every
| now and again I'm reminded of just how far we've extended our
| sensorium as a species.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| This was an interesting read, and reminded me how paleo-biology
| is the closest thing to exobiology we've got. Looking at the
| different biomes that emerged on planet earth over a billion
| years feels equivalent to looking at a thousand different planets
| at the same time. Basically a thousand chance to see what that
| 'megayear' produced, life wise.
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