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Giant, fungus-like organism may be a completely unknown branch of life

livescience.com

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Re: Giant, fungus-like organism may be a completely unknown branch of life

#111

Post by mmooss »

xdavidliu wrote: post #88
mmooss wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mult…

> 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.

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.

Re: Giant, fungus-like organism may be a completely unknown branch of life

#112

Post by therealpygon »

Liquix wrote: post #99
ahazred8ta wrote: post #2

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

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 microstruc…

[flagged]

Re: Giant, fungus-like organism may be a completely unknown branch of life

#113

Post by btilly »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #100
Ultimatt wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bio…

> 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.

Men like me also don't replicate by ourselves. Does that mean that we are not alive?

Re: Giant, fungus-like organism may be a completely unknown branch of life

#114

Post by Izkata »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #100
Ultimatt wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bio…

> 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.

I thought "has a metabolism" (consumes food and produces waste) was the one viruses didn't fit with.

Re: Giant, fungus-like organism may be a completely unknown branch of life

#115

Post by MyOutfitIsVague »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #63
card_zero wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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/correctne…

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."

Re: Giant, fungus-like organism may be a completely unknown branch of life

#116

Post by yencabulator »

mlhpdx wrote: post #95
TeMPOraL wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

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 broa…

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.

Re: Giant, fungus-like organism may be a completely unknown branch of life

#117

Post by ddejohn »

culi wrote: post #82
BrenBarn wrote: post #18

> 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?

it's called the wood wide web (seriously)

Scientists are so adorable

Re: Giant, fungus-like organism may be a completely unknown branch of life

#118

Post by NikolaNovak »

calibas wrote: post #16
mmooss wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 "Arch…

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 ig…

>>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 :).

Re: Giant, fungus-like organism may be a completely unknown branch of life

#119

Post by thaumasiotes »

dvdkon wrote: post #53
calibas wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ig…

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 o…

> 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.

Re: Giant, fungus-like organism may be a completely unknown branch of life

#120

Post by bbor »

calibas wrote: post #84
bbor wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 negati…

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…

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.

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