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Unicellular "Enigma" Changes From Predator To Plant and Back
SilverEar writes "Imagine a creature that swims and preys on others, but once it eats a certain kind of plant, that plant grows inside it, causing the predator to lose its ability to prey and start using sunlight to make its food. Its preying mouth is replaced by an eye that is needed to find sunlight. This is the Hatena ('enigma' in Japanese). The kicker: when Hatena reproduces, one offspring is a peaceful photosynthesizer with the sun-seeking eye, while the other is yet again a predator with a voracious mouth."
Plant or animal! Prepare the soft padded cells.
Definitely an interesting result. The original article is published in Science. A free abstract can be found here.
This is your creator deity... And this is your creator deity on drugs.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
The kicker: when Hatena reproduces, one offspring is a peaceful photosynthesizer with the sun-seeking eye, while the other is yet again a predator with a voracious mouth.
Sound like my wife
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
1. Mother eats plant 2. Plant grows inside mother 3. Mother morphs 4. Diametrically opposed sons are born 5. Decades of hilarity ensue
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At least they called it a "hypothesis" instead of forcing us to accept it as verified fact.
You say this as though "hypothesis" were some kind of weasel word, as though they actually do consider it a fact but are just calling it something else to avoid criticism.
Did it ever occur to you that this is precisely what a hypothesis is, and that the correlation =/= causation thing is the very reason that it is considered a hypothesis? I'm sure that these biologists have some vague idea what they're doing. If they thought that they had hard and fast proof they'd be moving this on to the "theory" stage. The very fact that they call it a hypothesis means that they agree with you.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
While this is extremely interesting, we need a link to the actual journal article, or to some source material, not just a link to a blog. Without that we can only assume this is an attempt to turf slashdot to drive traffic to your blog and generate ad revenues.
Hrm, one sibling is conniving and aggressive; and the other prefers to be left to its own devices. Sounds just like humans.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
Common ancestry may be independent of similar traits, is his point.
The problem, a common one, is that when a finding is reported, notions commonly understood among practitioners are omitted for brevity, and it can mislead when crossing over to non-practitioners of the fields and others less literate in science. Even worse is sometimes even the practitioners forget the proviso of the implicit notions.
Repeated mention of "correlation is not causation" may be annoying, but do serve a useful purpose, I think.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordyceps_sinensis , albeit multicellular, is also somewhat astonishing
I should have written:
"Common ancestry may be independent of [a particular] similar trait, is his point."
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I for one welcome our new single celled predatory overlords, but deride their single celled hippy photosynthesizing cousins.
Every time someone posts a stupid correlation versus causation argument on Slashdot, I want to smack them.
I call this the violence-inducing-argument hypothesis, because suggesting causation would just encourage them.
Biology is full of promoter-inhibitor relationships, and this seems like an interesting one. When the algae is inside the protist, the host's "animal" behaviors and anatomy are suppressed, but they clearly remain in a latent state, ready to reactivate after fission. It makes one wonder to what extent chloroplasts remain as endosymbionts versus organelles in genuine plant species. So . . .
. . .
Does anyone know of any research where chloroplasts were removed from plant cells in culture, to see if the remaining cells revert to some atavistic animal-like exogenous-food-seeking state?
... as Palmer (David Clennon) says in John Carpenters The Thing (1982), as Norris' head grows legs and tries to walk away ...
Does this mean EA can sue nature due to copyright infringement?
And, in fact, you are related because you share a common ancestor, even if it is many generations removed.
Do you know that?
Imagine a blogger that submits its link to slashdot, but once it appears there, that blog can no longer serve pages.
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
Yes. All humans alive now share a common ancestor.
My Photography - http://ian-x.com
The Deathlings (comic) - http://thedeathlings.com
For all those interested, Scientific American has the story.
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How do you know he's human? All I see is text on my screen.
I see no evidence that any intelligence other than human can compose original, coherent posts to an online forum. So with over 95 percent confidence, posts at or above Score:1 are written by humans.
This is similar to the statement that says correlation does not equal causation. Just because I have brown hair and someone across the country also has brown hair and many other similarities doesn't mean both of us are related. At least they called it a "hypothesis" instead of forcing us to accept it as verified fact.
0) The claim of relatedness is based on a rigorous mathematical theory based on the theory of common descent, graph theory and Levenshtein distance. No competent mathematician in the world objects to these methods.
1) Slashbots are fucking retarded on the subject of statistics, and cannot wrap their puny minds around the concept of Bayesian inference. You better believe correlation God damn CAN show causation in some cases.
Weak. You easily could have worked facebook and sheeple in there. Maybe even global climate change. And global warming.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I see no evidence that any intelligence other than human can compose original, coherent posts to an online forum. So with over 95 percent confidence, posts at or above Score:1 are written by humans.
I see no evidence that any intelligence...posts to an online forum.
Fixed that for you !
Smivs on the intertubes!
That sounds good, can you make some toast for me please? Someone else here is bound to be a butter knife, so maybe we can get a team effort going?
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
But when I read the article summary, one of the first questions on my mind was... How does it interact with Japanese schoolgirls?
Please. Not so loud. Fox is looking for a sitcom theme for next season.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Correlation is not equal to causation; it is only a requirement for it
You are what you eat!
In that case we would't at least have to ask "Does he run NetBSD?"...
Ezekiel 23:20
Oh my God! You're right! I don't anything for sure.
JESUS CHRIST! What if I'm really a toaster?
I mean, I have a lot of the same qualities as a human being, but that doesn't prove anything. What if I'm supposed to be making toast right now?!?!?
Check if you are plugged in.
This gives the organism the ability to take advantage of any advances in Photosynthesis that the prey has made! Thereby incorporating them in future generations! Like some people I know! Always upgrading to the latest and greatest!
And if you really got worked up, a TIME CUBE reference wouldn't've been too hard, you educated stupid one-dimensional DULLARD.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
After ingesting the algae, this mouth disappears. Instead, it is replaced by an eyespot from the algae. The eyespot is a light sensing organelle, a very primitive eye that guides algae to light sources. In this case, it also guides the host, Hatena, to light. Hatena has obvioulsy stopped feeding, and least through its mouth. It is now swimming to the light, letting the alga photosynthesize its food for both of them.
Doesn't that quality the hatena as a parasite?
Property is theft.
Oh my God! You're right! I don't anything for sure.
JESUS CHRIST! What if I'm really a toaster?
I mean, I have a lot of the same qualities as a human being, but that doesn't prove anything. What if I'm supposed to be making toast right now?!?!?
The toasters were created by man...they rebelled, they evolved, they look...Human!
Shit happens and it's usually caused by assholes
Every time someone posts a stupid correlation versus causation argument on Slashdot, I want to smack them.
I call this the violence-inducing-argument hypothesis, because suggesting causation would just encourage them.
Sing it, brother!
It's a kind of pseudo-intellectual argument which is, unfortunately, very appealing to geeks. Stupid, ignorant people are prone to assuming that correlation always implies causation (even if they don't know to put it in those words) and drawing conclusions that reasonably intelligent, slightly less ignorant people can clearly see are false. So at some point they read a Philosophy 101 list of logical fallacies on the web, come across "correlation does not imply causation," and think, "Ah hah! That explains what all those stupid people are doing!" At which point it becomes the proverbial hammer for which every problem is a nail.
...
In case it isn't clear: correlation, when calculated to account for confounding factors and observed enough to establish significance, is the only way we have to establish causation in the natural world. It is exactly how every accepted scientific "fact" (i.e., theory, which is as close to fact as science can ever get) was established. Everything you think you know about the way the world works is based on a correlation so significant that nobody seriously expects it to turn out the be an artifact. And that's all we've got.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
This should totally be a creature spell for Magic: The Gathering.
And if you really got worked up, a TIME CUBE reference wouldn't've been too hard, you educated stupid one-dimensional DULLARD.
Not TIME CUBE , Time Tunnel S01E28 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0723775/ Dont worry we'll win, just wait till sunset
Alternatively we might have to watch out for Carrots http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0636227/
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
The toasters look like us now.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
"Hatena" doesn't really mean "enigma". It's actually an interjection, and a more accurate translation would be something like "Weird!" or "Oh man!".
I see no evidence that any intelligence other than human can compose original, coherent posts to an online forum.
You just go on thinking that way; it makes life very easy for us visiting aliens.
How often do you have to renew your green card?
Yes, a few humans do realize what we are, but when they try to tell the rest, they're just treated as insane or stupid.
I'm willing to open my mind. Does your team have a site on the humans' World Wide Web?
JESUS CHRIST! What if I'm really a toaster?
There are twelve Cylon models. If you don't look like any of them, then you're not a frakin' toaster.
Always assuming that correlation means causation is stupid.
Always assuming it doesn't and hence we should never try and determine cause and effect and just call everything random is even stupider.
A food that, when eaten, transforms an agressive predator into a passive life form....
Wedding cake.
Have gnu, will travel.
But it's very interesting, nonetheless. The real question is: Does the plant tame the predator, or does the predator domesticate the plant? Btw, no one tagged this story "symbiosis"? I can't seem to tag stories.
A large number of your average corals on the reef do this daily. They both capture plankton and use symbiosis with photosynthetic algae in their bodies.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
That's amusing, considering that your argument is a correlation vs. causation argument in itself.
It proves that you suck at being a toaster.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
I'm willing to open my mind. Does your team have a site on the humans' World Wide Web?
Actually, some of us do. I have a personal web site that includes a FAQ that describes my job as a sort of "field worker", an anthropologist visiting Earth to collect information about human society. I occasionally get nice messages from others who turn out to be human, saying that they're doing something similar. I also get occasional email from human nut cases with the usual incoherent rambling. That's interesting, too; it's part of the "human condition", and goes into the records. But so far no contact from any government agency. All the stories about secret government contact with aliens seem to be just fiction. You'd think that some of them would want to make contact, but even when we write openly about our activities, it doesn't happen.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
In case it isn't clear: correlation, when calculated to account for confounding factors and observed enough to establish significance, is the only way we have to establish causation in the natural world. It is exactly how every accepted scientific "fact" (i.e., theory, which is as close to fact as science can ever get) was established.
Just because correlation has a high correlation with causation does not mean that correlation is causation. Have you considered that some factor other than correlation may be contributing to the causation?
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Have you considered that some factor other than correlation may be contributing to the causation?
The section of my post that you quote contains the answer to your question. That's what a confounding factor is.
To take a very simple example: if you examine two populations, one consisting of old smokers who frequently die of heart attacks and another consisting of young non-smokers who rarely die of heart attacks, and conclude that smoking increases the risk of death by heart attack, then you're clearly drawing a false conclusion. (Or rather, you may be getting the right answer, but you have no way of knowing if it's right or not.) However, if you adjust for age, sex, race, environmental exposure, diet, exercise, and any other identifiable factors that may contribute to heart problems, and you can show that the smokers still have more fatal heart attacks than the non-smokers, then you have a very powerful argument that smoking makes you more likely to die of a heart attack. If your sample size is sufficiently large, and if you can convince people that you've accounted for all the likely confounders, then you have come as close to "proof" as science can ever come.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I agree with you completely. I just wanted to pick on you a little for essentially using correlation to argue that correlation is causation, although it'd be more amusing (and ironic) if you'd been going for the opposite.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
I've seen similar behavior in humans all the time -- it's called "marriage".
Table-ized A.I.
1. Mother eats plant 2. Plant grows inside mother 3. Mother morphs 4. Diametrically opposed sons are born 5. Decades of hilarity ensue
<oblig>
6. Profit!
</oblig>
--
.nosig