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

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

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 disregar…

It wouldn't be so nice if it was oversimplified and incorrect to the extent that the child realizes it doesn't add up.

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.

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

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn't be so nice if it was oversimplified and incorrect to the extent that the child realizes it doesn't add up.

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 lo…

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.

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

#43
post #23

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 mat…

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.

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

#44
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…

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 disregar…

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.

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

#45
post #8

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?

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.

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

#46
post #9

> 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 wh…

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…

Glad to see diamond inheritance being a problem in other fields

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

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn't be so nice if it was oversimplified and incorrect to the extent that the child realizes it doesn't add up.

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 lo…

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".

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

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 disregar…

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.

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".

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

#49
post #28
post #3

> 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 t…

Protogroots

Protomolecule.

Allows for Protozombies [as seen on TV]?

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

#50
post #11

> 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?

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?
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