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The Tree of Life Consolidates
Roland Piquepaille writes "The Tree of Life is an expression first used by Charles Darwin to describe the diversity of organisms on Earth and their evolutionary history. There are only two life forms, — eukaryotes, which gather their genetic material in a nucleus, and prokaryotes, such as bacteria, which have their genetic material floating freely in the cell. Until recently, eukaryotes, which include humans, were divided into five groups. But now, based on work by European researchers, the Tree of Life has lost a branch. After doing the largest ever genetic comparison of life forms they concluded that there are only four groups of eukaryotes."
The more we know, the more we know that what we knew was wrong.
Or, as a coworker of mine used to say when we realized we didn't know what we were doing: "Everything you know is wrong."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
What else will science rob from us before we decide enough is enough?
While a tree-structure is algorithmically convenient and very enticing... the "tree of life" is not a tree.
Ie it is not a "directed, acyclic graph".
Unfortunately it has 'cycles'.
Blame retroviruses; they can take genetic material from one species and insert it into the genome of another thereby creating cross-branches.
As I recall, from my genetics days, baboon retroviruses are a great example of this. Again, IIRC, domestic cats and humans both contain fragments of baboon retroviruses.
Its possible that the "Cambrian explosion" is a sign of the appearance of retroviruses on the scene.
The thing is that it is significantly harder to reason about graphs; trees are so much easier to deal with.
So its very tempting to see things like this as trees and to 'simplify out' the nasty cross-branches.
(I've studied genetics, computer science, logic and discrete math)
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Let's not forget that many scientists think there are three domains (Prokaryotes, Eukaryotes and Archaea). Archaea are very similar to Prokaryotes in that they don't have a nucleus, but they also share many features with Eukaryotes, including several key enzymes. Due to their similarity to the two other lineages, it is thought that Archaea may in fact be the grand daddy of all life. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaea
In the pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added.
In the pursuit of understanding, every day something is removed.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Define "seen"? Because by your argument, electrons may or may not exist, Proto-Indo-European may or may not have existed and you may or may not have had great-great-grand-parents.
Evolution is confirmed not just by observing what goes on now, but by observing the fossil record, and just as importantly nowadays, by gathering molecular data. These two lines of evidence fit very well together into the so-called twin-nest hierarchy.
If you wish to wander down the road of epistemological nihilism, that's your affair, but be aware that everything, and I mean everything you think you know you can't actually know at all. Either you admit that inference is a legitimate means of gathering factual knowledge, or you render the whole show, including what you see, hear, touch, feel and taste irrelevant.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Well, unless you are someone who strictly interprets the OT: http://www.godhatesshrimp.com/
I never heard of "PLoS ONE", it claims to be a peer reviewed journal at least. If this was ground breaking I'd expect it to be published in Nature though.
I'm actually surprised you haven't heard of PLoS journals.
PLoS is an open-access publisher of science journals. Basically, the journals are free to access, and content is published under a creative-commons-type license.
PLoS journals are excellent, and rival the best journals in their content. There is no "general" science journal like Science or Nature, but there are topical journals like PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine, etc. I'd argue that the content in these topic journals are comparable to Nature and Science publications.
PLoS One is a relatively experimental journal published by PLoS that attempts to push the open access model to its limits, by making the peer-review process completely open, where anyone is allowed to comment.
If anything, the fact that this article was published in a PLoS journal raised rather than lowered my expectations regarding its quality.