A Wikipedia-Style Tree of Life Emerges

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A Wikipedia-Style Tree of Life Emerges

Posted by timothy on Sunday September 20, 2015 @07:04AM from the 'tis-but-a-seed dept.

The Christian Science Monitor reports on the newly announced Open Tree of Life, a freely accessible unified interface to, and archive, of biological taxonomies. In the current version, data from nearly 500 evolutionary timelines has been assembled into a single, searchable view of all known life forms; From the CSM report: Building the computer code and compiling the data took three years, and involved collaborators from Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, the Web development firm Interrobang, the University of Michigan, the University of Florida, Duke University, and George Washington University. "Many participants on the project contributed hundreds of hours tracking down and cleaning up thousands of trees from the literature, then selecting 484 of them that were used to generate the draft tree of life," said Cody Hinchliff, a scientist from the University of Idaho, in the announcement.

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Kardashian? by chill · 2015-09-20 07:41 · Score: 3, Funny

I can't find "Kardashian" in there. I figured it would at least show up under one of the various forms of uncultured bacterium.

--
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
1. Re:Kardashian? by Anonymous Coward · 2015-09-20 07:51 · Score: 1
  
  You didn't search in Latin:
  "Assius Giganticus"
2. Re:Kardashian? by Anonymous Coward · 2015-09-20 08:10 · Score: 1
  
  Actually in latin it would be: giganteas asinum
3. Re:Kardashian? by mrbester · 2015-09-20 08:20 · Score: 1
  
  More like gluteus maximus maximus
  
  --
  "Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
4. Re:Kardashian? by Darinbob · 2015-09-20 08:28 · Score: 2
  
  Yes we all know she is burdened with a big ass. Which is why you should never rush into a marriage.
5. Re: Kardashian? by Anonymous Coward · 2015-09-20 08:46 · Score: 0
  
  Why?
6. Re:Kardashian? by Anonymous Coward · 2015-09-20 08:52 · Score: 1
  
  See, they wouldn't be in there, because Kardashians are aliens.
  Or is that Cardassians? Something like that.
7. Re:Kardashian? by Anonymous Coward · 2015-09-20 10:10 · Score: 0
  
  Idiota giganteculorum
8. Re: Kardashian? by silentcoder · 2015-09-20 23:35 · Score: 1
  
  Fornicare hoc stercum
  
  --
  Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
9. Re:Kardashian? by drew870mitchell · 2015-09-21 02:24 · Score: 1
  
  Hey everybody, I found Jay Leno's /. account!
Almost Cool by JMJimmy · 2015-09-20 07:44 · Score: 3, Interesting

It'd be cooler if it was general public friendly. Scientists might find it useful but the general public will have no use for something they can't understand. Really though it seems like they're just copying others databases (primarily NCBI and SILVA) which have "trees" of their own.
1. Re:Almost Cool by ethogram · 2015-09-20 14:05 · Score: 1
  
  It's more complicated than that. Opentree builds a taxonomy which is a 'consensus' from taxonomies from NCBI, SILVA, Index Fungorum, WoRMS, etc. This taxonomy is then used to scaffold the assembly of a phylogeny from the set of accepted trees. These trees (478 in the current synthesis) are selected from the ~3000 studies that have been contributed to the database. There are groups (for example spiders) where the coverage by available trees is rather sparse or absent. In these cases, the synthetic tree necessarily falls back on taxonomy, but that represents a failure of coverage, not the intent of the project. I agree that the biggest benefit will be to scientists who have a relatively friendly, github backed, collection of published phylogenetic trees (thus, more like TREEBASE). The synthetic tree will help fill in the gaps where a tree is required that is not covered by any one existing phylogeny.
2. Re:Almost Cool by Tough+Love · 2015-09-20 17:18 · Score: 1
  
  It's like making an English dictionary, except way worse.
  
  --
  When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
3. Re:Almost Cool by JMJimmy · 2015-09-20 21:48 · Score: 1
  
  That's kinda my point. "wiki" style is really only useful if you have the general public involved. By harvesting the generic data (names/trees) from other databases all it's really doing is indexing sources scientists would already go to for the real data (ie: paywalled information). Without the real data behind it or something for the general public I can't see it being hugely useful to anyone imo.
4. Re:Almost Cool by ethogram · 2015-09-21 00:15 · Score: 1
  
  The wiki aspect is the ability for anyone to upload a (published) tree and map its tips to names in the taxonomy. Literally, anyone with a github id can contribute. However, I do concede your point - the skill to map names to tips and access to trees are not attributes your average Joe is likely to display.
Now it just needs complete genome sequences... by NicknameUnavailable · 2015-09-20 07:59 · Score: 2

...of multiple individuals of each species and to remain open sourced. Then we'll have a serious rush in biotech as algorithms designed for computational biology along the same lines of semantic footprinting will be able to act as an intermediary/compiler for writing genetic code.
Very Cool by jestill · 2015-09-20 08:00 · Score: 1

The Encyclopedia of Life is geared more toward the public http://eol.org/. The cool thing about the effort in the open tree of life ( http://opentreeoflife.org/ ) is that it is open data and open source driven. You can check out the code on github. https://github.com/OpenTreeOfL...

--
"Asleep at the switch? I wasn't asleep, I was drunk!" -- Homer
1. Re:Very Cool by fluffernutter · 2015-09-20 08:09 · Score: 2
  
  I was going to say the same thing about eol.org. Why reinvent the wheel? I think eol.olg is very well done. Much better than wikipedia in terms of layout and navigation.
  
  --
  Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
2. Re:Very Cool by JMJimmy · 2015-09-20 08:13 · Score: 1
  
  Yet it harvests much of the data from a closed RNA database...
Which day by penguinoid · 2015-09-20 08:33 · Score: 0

But does it say on which day God created them?

--
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
1. Re:Which day by ozduo · 2015-09-20 09:26 · Score: 1
  
  don't say god use the abbreviation FSM who created everything immediately after the big boil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
  
  --
  I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
Is there a prize? by Anonymous Coward · 2015-09-20 08:35 · Score: 1

...for navigating from the top down to homo sapiens without using the search facility?
The Tree of Life can't Handle Open Source by tinkerton · 2015-09-20 08:43 · Score: 2

Just the odd observation, but the treelike organisation is suitable for well defined species, in other words when lifeforms act pretty much according to closed source strategies (but not completely). According to some smart people in the beginning the dominant organisation was open source, lots of exchange.
The open source thing still happens of course, and it's fascinating when it happens. It gets the news sometimes when the subject is Influenza.
There was an important article almost 50 years ago (Symbiogenesis, see Lynn Margulis) stating that some components of the eukaryotic cell have actually been imported from prokaryotes: mitochondria and organelles.
1. Re:The Tree of Life can't Handle Open Source by Anonymous Coward · 2015-09-20 11:02 · Score: 1
  
  Oh yeah, there were and still are loads of exchanges of functionality in biology.
  Parasitic organisms living off others, occasionally will accidentally become absorbed in to the DNA of the creature, or even in some cases deliberate like with retroviral strains.
  Some of these have even been linked to cancers whenever they become activated for whatever reason. (why they sometimes activate is something under heavy research right now ever since we found that out since it could provide a huge avenue of attack against them due to it being in inactive DNA regions, "junk DNA" or whatever it gets called these days)
  There was likely a time where loads of different creatures evolved similar organs, the eyes for example, likely evolved loads of times, but for the most part, there are very few examples of still in-use, they just took over all the other likely failures due to their success.
  The neuron and brain evolution was likely something that took many exchanges to get to what is considered a modern brain you find across most reasonably complex creatures, building up complexity with each, becoming more specialized and optimized.
  That new scan of the structure of the brain recently completely changed how we saw the brain, what was once thought of a mess of wiring and interconnects was in fact stupidly well-ordered, a sysadmins porn of order, tightly packed and discrete.
2. Re:The Tree of Life can't Handle Open Source by EstanislaoStan · 2015-09-20 14:36 · Score: 1
  
  I read that article in my college laboratory class!
3. Re:The Tree of Life can't Handle Open Source by tinkerton · 2015-09-20 19:51 · Score: 1
  
  But at that time there wasn't as much proof for it. It's official now :)
graphical Harvard museum effort not available by call+-151 · 2015-09-20 08:46 · Score: 2

It's really too bad that the fabulous museum exhibit display Deep Tree isn't more broadly available. There is a lovely display, with graphical interface, which is just enchanting to wander through much of the tree of life. It does a great job conveying the scale of the diversity of life and the boggling number of species, and it's aimed at the general public. It has nice pinch/zoom/etc. touch-screen functionality on a table-sized display. Unfortunately, for years, there was exactly one place on earth where you could play with it: at the Harvard Natural History Museum. And unless you are there at a particularly empty time, you will have to squeeze a fair number of kids out of the way to actually play with it for more than about two minutes. Now, things have improved a bit and it looks like there are a grand total of four museums that have the exhibit. (You should visit if there is one near you, try to avoid a time when school field trips are likely to be there!) The development was supported by a $2.3 million US National Science Foundation grant so public money was used to develop it, and it seems feasible to implement it or at least a scaled-down version of it on what are now much more common multi-touch displays like tablets or at least be available on the web, but as far as I can tell, it's been years since the grant and still the only place you can use it is in these four museums. I see this as a missed opportunity for a dramatic broader impact on understanding evolution and the scale of the diversity of life.

--
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
1. Re:graphical Harvard museum effort not available by call+-151 · 2015-09-20 12:14 · Score: 1
  
  It's really too bad that the fabulous museum exhibit display Deep Tree isn't more broadly available. .
  Aha, happy to be mistaken and outdated on this one- I looked and found that now there is a web page via NOVA with a good interesting subset of the data. It's nicely done and at the DeepTree link at this link.
  
  --
  It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
2. Re:graphical Harvard museum effort not available by Michael+Woodhams · 2015-09-20 15:49 · Score: 2
  
  On my list of things to do should I ever inexplicably become astonishingly wealthy is to build a museum of phylogeny.
  It would be a natural history museum, but with exhibits organized phylogenetically and the phylogeny would be represented by lines (mostly on the floor but branching out onto walls where needed) with a scale of something like 1 meter to 1 million years. (There would need to be an ongoing process of updating as scientific consensus changes.)
  If you want to know how closely related you are to a chicken, you can walk it: start at H. sapiens, walk back to the mammal/dinosaur common ancestor, then forwards taking the correct paths until you reach G. gallus. The dinosaur part of the museum will be 65+ meters from the main part of the museum (representing the current day.) The main grounds of the museum will be about 550m long to cover Cambrian explosion to current day. About 3.5km away will be a much smaller museum about the origin of life. Somewhere in between will be a small museum about the origin of eukaryotes. At selected branching points on the phylogeny there will be metal cubes beside each branch, the volume of which are proportional to the now-living biomass descended from each branch.
  There are some practical challenges in building this museum that I haven't worked out. Should I find myself with a few hundred million dollars and nothing better to spend them on, I'll give those challenges serious thought. (Or pay someone else to give them serious thought.)
  
  --
  Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
3. Re:graphical Harvard museum effort not available by Sique · 2015-09-20 21:26 · Score: 1
  
  Will you have a building for the Gabonionta about 2 km from the room for the H. sapiens?
  
  --
  .sig: Sique *sigh*
4. Re:graphical Harvard museum effort not available by call+-151 · 2015-09-21 00:19 · Score: 1
  
  When the American Museum of Natural History in New York redid the fourth floor exhibits about dinosaurs, they chose to arrange the specimens in a tree-like structure representing their phylogeny (well, subject to the constraint that it's basically a big loop with a few bumps and nooks and crannies.) At the time (this was the late 1990s,) it was controversial because most museums grouped specimens by function (carnivores, herbivores, etc.) instead of by their evolutionary path. In fact, the AMNH welcoming film to the dinosaur floor (the Meryl Streep-narrated one) really does quite a nice job explaining the tree and the museum visitor's path through the tree as they walk the halls.
  
  --
  It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
5. Re:graphical Harvard museum effort not available by Michael+Woodhams · 2015-09-21 10:49 · Score: 1
  
  That is really cool, I didn't know about those. Thanks.
  For the sake of practicality, they'd probably be 600m from H. sapiens in the Ediacaran building, plus there'd be little sign beside the path from 'origin of life' to the main museum, at 2 km, to mark the correct location.
  
  --
  Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
6. Re:graphical Harvard museum effort not available by RockDoctor · 2015-09-22 04:14 · Score: 1
  
  Given that there is significant disagreement at this time over their placement in the TOL, or indeed whether they're even in the TOL (pity Dolf Seilacher died recently - a major contributor to the field.), then it's probably too early to plan where to put them.
  This museum had better have it's buildings on rails, so they can be shuffled around.
  
  --
  Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
7. Re:graphical Harvard museum effort not available by Sique · 2015-09-23 01:02 · Score: 1
  
  The age is quite undisputed, but the actual nature of the fossils is unclear: Are they really remainings of multicellular life, are they just some strange type of bacterial colonies, ore are are they abiotic anyway and thus don't belong in the TOL at all?
  I've been at the exhibition in the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien, and I've seen the fossils (or at least quite convincing replicas of them), and they looked like some type of small, round pillows with large braids. So to a non-palaeontologist like me, they looked like some type of seabed dwelling animals.
  
  --
  .sig: Sique *sigh*
8. Re:graphical Harvard museum effort not available by Sique · 2015-09-23 01:08 · Score: 1
  
  For reference: That's the link to the actual exhibition page.
  
  --
  .sig: Sique *sigh*
9. Re: graphical Harvard museum effort not available by RockDoctor · 2015-09-27 11:41 · Score: 1
  
  The age is uncontroversial (to me at least; I was reading up on these discoveries the last time I was working in Gabon, thinking I might take some vacation after work to rock - hunt these and the Oklo reactors. But Oklo is mined out and shutdown now, and the area had an Ebola outbreak. So I gave it a miss.)
  But with so many of these very ancient "fossils" you have to be extremely careful about misidentifying inorganic features as fossils. Witness "School's Embarrassment", the continuing dispute over "Moizsij's (I've forgotten how to spell his name; the radiometric dating bod from Oxford) Apatites", and "McKay's Martian Worms".
  Despite their appealing appearance, the putative Francevillain Biota remains putative. Fascinating but unproven.
  
  --
  Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
10. Re: graphical Harvard museum effort not available by RockDoctor · 2015-09-27 11:47 · Score: 1
  
  Damn. HTML fail.
  I didn't know about the Vienna connection. If I had, I might have visited it when the wife and I were in the German Alps last year. I'll file that in the memory for future use.
  
  --
  Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
You are here by penguinoid · 2015-09-20 08:55 · Score: 1

Eukaryota > Opisthokonta > Holozoa > Metazoa > * > * > * > Bilatera > * > Deuterostomia > Chrodata > * > Craniata > Vertebrata > Gnathostomata > Teleostomi > Eutelostomi > Sarcopterygii > Dinotetrapodomorpha > Tetrapoda > Amniota > Mammalia > Theria > Eutheria > Boreoeutheria > Euarchontoglires > * > Primates> Haplorrhini > Simiiformes > Catarrhini > Hominoidea > Hominindae > * > Homininae > * > Homo > Homo Sapiens

--
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Re:Xians hate science as their... by Cederic · 2015-09-20 09:35 · Score: 1

'ex' ians? Just typing 'Xians' shows what a cunt you are.
The Christian Science Monitor is always (when I read it) a refreshingly objective and sane publication that talks rationally about science.
Slashdot editors are asleep again. by flargleblarg · 2015-09-20 11:41 · Score: 1

TFS says:

The Christian Science Monitor reports on the newly announced Open Tree of Life, a freely accessible unified interface to, and archive, of biological taxonomies.
A crucial comma is in totally the wrong place there. It should say:

The Christian Science Monitor reports on the newly announced Open Tree of Life, a freely accessible unified interface to, and archive of, biological taxonomies.
1. Re:Slashdot editors are asleep again. by Anonymous Coward · 2015-09-20 13:20 · Score: 0
  
  TFS says:
  
  The Christian Science Monitor reports on the newly announced Open Tree of Life, a freely accessible unified interface to, and archive, of biological taxonomies.
  A crucial comma is in totally the wrong place there. It should say:
  
  The Christian Science Monitor reports on the newly announced Open Tree of Life, a freely accessible unified interface to, and archive of, biological taxonomies.
  Wut? You expect proper editing?
  You must be new here.
Re:Christian Science Monitor by TapeCutter · 2015-09-20 12:01 · Score: 4, Insightful

I have been atheist/agnostic for over 50yrs, CSM has been in print for 100. In my experience CSM understands (and chronicles) science better than most MSM rags. Unlike Isaac Newton, I have never heard them spewing religious nonsense at their audience.

--
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Re:GEORGE CARLIN and the treeee of live by TapeCutter · 2015-09-20 12:06 · Score: 1

He's dead.Jim.

--
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Open Source can't Handle Open Source by aNonnyMouseCowered · 2015-09-20 12:25 · Score: 1

Joking aside, most open source can't handle open source. I mean, you can't randomly insert emacs source code into the Linux kernel, can you? There are definitely rules that govern the exchange of source code between projects, even if we disregard the conflicting licenses. For example you often have to port code that runs beautifully on desktop GNU/Linux to run on a broken Linux like Android, and that's even if you're running the same architecture (x86, ARM, etc).
Wikispecies? by aNonnyMouseCowered · 2015-09-20 12:29 · Score: 2

Isn't this already being done with Wikispecies.org (https://species.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page)?
Catch phrases: "The free species directory that anyone can edit." "Wikispecies is free, because life is in the public domain!"
1. Re:Wikispecies? by koavf · 2015-09-21 07:25 · Score: 1
  
  It is, yes! We'd be happy to have any slashdotters who want to help.
Open source mutations by TapeCutter · 2015-09-20 12:38 · Score: 1

Yes, sometime the branches on the tree rub together and the consequences can be huge, such as when mitochondria 'decided' to take up residence in a larger cell and created the common ancestor of all animals. We don't know nearly enough about "open source" mutations to start mapping them, however if we took this tree and added genome sequences to the leaves and branch points, we might get some more hints.

OTOH a "tree of life" doesn't really care about how the mutations occurred because 'species' is a somewhat arbitrary term that divides a continuum of tiny changes, much like the continuum of real numbers that exists between two integers. This is best illustrated with Ring Species

--
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Re:Christian Science Monitor by quenda · 2015-09-20 14:20 · Score: 3, Informative

This should have been in the summary. For those who don't know:
- Christian Science as a religion has strong anti-science beliefs, including rejection of modern medicine in favour of prayer. BUT ...
- The CSM newspaper is a highly respected news source, mostly independent from the religion except for a daily editorial. Think of it as being sponsored by the church.
It has won seven Pulitzer Prizes.
Re:Christian Science Monitor by quenda · 2015-09-20 14:23 · Score: 2

I have been atheist/agnostic for over 50yrs, ... Unlike Isaac Newton, I have never heard them spewing religious nonsense at their audience.
So for about 90% of your life so far, you were religious?
Another good resource by somepunk · 2015-09-20 15:34 · Score: 1

UCMP has an online exhibit that I find to be more browsable and complete than the other sites I've tried.

--
Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. (Isaac Asimov)
Amborella Wars by Michael+Woodhams · 2015-09-20 16:08 · Score: 1

Wonderful - now all the scientific feuding over whether Amborella is the basal angiosperm can spill over into wiki edit wars.
(Amborella trichopoda is a New Caledonian flowering plant (angiosperm) with no close relatives. The deepest split in the angiosperm phylogeny may be Amborella splitting from everything else. Much ink and enmity has been spent on whether or not this is so. Here is a summary I found, although on a skim read I suspect it was written by a partisan.)

--
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
No multiple inheritance... so far by Tough+Love · 2015-09-20 17:24 · Score: 1

It is inevitable that some organism has inherited so much of its genome by reverse transcriptase etc as to muddy the question of exactly what it descended from. Then artificial species will start showing up and it alls gets even messier than it is now. I wonder if it could eventually have cycles.

--
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
1. Re:No multiple inheritance... so far by Anonymous Coward · 2015-09-21 00:59 · Score: 0
  
  we have some genome of fly's in us. While its definetly not sexually transmitted it still shows that sometimes some genes just cross the border.
Re:Christian Science Monitor by Anonymous Coward · 2015-09-20 19:27 · Score: 0

The high-quality of CSM sure is a strange fit for CS, one of the stupidest religions.
As I recall reading before, the science part of Christian Science would be stuff like "researching" how many prayers can heal an illness, etc.
Re:Christian Science Monitor by Aristos+Mazer · 2015-09-20 23:29 · Score: 1

As a journalism major, one of my projects was to evaluate the quality of different news sources. CSM ranked in that project as a very high quality newspaper. The religion of their founder includes "tell the truth" among its foundational tenets, and over 100 years, they've allowed that to take priority over the rest of their philosophy, even in medical reporting, which is the area where Christian Science and actual science differ the most.
http://tolweb.org/ by devent · 2015-09-21 00:11 · Score: 1

http://tolweb.org/
Is also a Tree Of Life project, but unlike OpenTree, it have pictures and descriptions and it also contains extinct species.
For examples for Aves:
https://tree.opentreeoflife.or...
http://tolweb.org/Aves

--
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
Re: Xians hate science as their... by belg4mit · 2015-09-21 00:16 · Score: 1

Get a clue. Chi(-Rho) has long been used as shorthand for "Christianity" (itself a recent notion), to wit: Xmas.

--
Were that I say, pancakes?
Re: Xians hate science as their... by Cederic · 2015-09-21 00:41 · Score: 1

I don't use that abbreviation either.
Exmas? Really? No. Laziness from lazy fuckwits that can't spell.
Re:Christian Science Monitor by Anonymous Coward · 2015-09-21 01:01 · Score: 0

It's a good thing they (unlike most readers and media outlets alike) are able to tell the difference between being scientific and pushing opinions down peoples' throats as fact.
Re:Christian Science Monitor by Anonymous Coward · 2015-09-21 03:55 · Score: 0

Grape! Goober goglies!!
Eddy used older meaning of science by peter303 · 2015-09-21 04:06 · Score: 1

The older meaning is a "comprehensive system of practice" often related to healing. The modern meaning of the scientific method was coined around 1840, but not widely adopted for a couple more decades. In the 1850s Darwin called his profession natural philosophy, not science. The scientific method itself was described by Bacon in the early 1600s, but generally called natural philosophy then. Many 17th, 18th, 19th century scientific journals will contain the word philosophy in the title.
called horizontal transfer by peter303 · 2015-09-21 04:16 · Score: 1

Via infection or intentional quasi-sexual gene exchanges. Common in bacteria. Less common in metazoa. However genetists suspect a small fraction (1% to 8%) of the human genome was came through retrovirus infection. Soem from hundreds of millions of years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Messes up creating these genetic taxometries.
Re: Xians hate science as their... by tbannist · 2015-09-21 07:18 · Score: 1

Exmas? Really? No. Laziness from lazy fuckwits that can't spell.
Welcome to the Internet, you must be new here...

--
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Encyclopedia of Life? by Anonymous Coward · 2015-09-21 07:38 · Score: 0

Also,
http://www.eol.org/
Re:Christian Science Monitor by tehcyder · 2015-09-21 21:20 · Score: 1

The CSM newspaper is a highly respected news source, mostly independent from the religion except for a daily editorial. Think of it as being sponsored by the church.
I'm not American, so I've never read the newspaper, although I am aware of the religion, and the phrase "mostly independent" sounds worrying.
How can you tell which bits are influenced by what is frankly a bizarre and dangerous religion?
If you genuinely believe that illness is an illusion that can be cured by prayer, this must make it impossible to accept any biological science at all.
If all the editors and journalists are not Christian Scientists themselves, why would they want to be associated with the name? And what happens if a big medical or biological news story crops up?

--
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Re:Christian Science Monitor by tehcyder · 2015-09-21 21:21 · Score: 1

As a journalism major, one of my projects was to evaluate the quality of different news sources. CSM ranked in that project as a very high quality newspaper. The religion of their founder includes "tell the truth" among its foundational tenets, and over 100 years, they've allowed that to take priority over the rest of their philosophy, even in medical reporting, which is the area where Christian Science and actual science differ the most.
But how could you trust that the stupid religion was completely separate from the newspaper?

--
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Re: Xians hate science as their... by tehcyder · 2015-09-21 21:23 · Score: 1

Get a clue. Chi(-Rho) has long been used as shorthand for "Christianity" (itself a recent notion), to wit: Xmas.
True, but your average Christian wingnut finds "Xmas" offensive too, against all reason.

--
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Re:Christian Science Monitor by Anonymous Coward · 2015-09-22 03:16 · Score: 0

Ugh, this EVERY time? I am amazed so many Americans do not know that Christian Science Monitor is a very respectable news source, especially for science coverage. Case in point: They currently have this quiz on their front page (Climate Change: Is your opinion informed by science?).
http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2014/0827/Climate-change-Is-your-opinion-informed-by-science-Take-our-quiz/Gas?cmpid=prc:enviro:b