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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

#61

Post by 9dev »

johnisgood wrote: post #29
9dev wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well in very practical terms, it gives you a way to name things you see in the forest, to figure out what is edible, and to understand what has a sentience of its own, similar to yours. I don’t mean to be snarky, but it seems like you’re very removed from the reality of normal people and parents out there.

There is much more to figure out what is edible and what is not. Considering shrooms alone, it is much more "complicated", so much that there are specialists for that, even, but I agree, could be an useful skill, but not for people who do not even leave the city, I think. However, they should know the basics such as "not eating potatoes (or its parts) that are green", and so forth, since that is something you run int…

I didn’t say there wasn’t. My point is that explaining to kids why they can pick a strawberry from the forest floor, but leave the fly agaric where it is, despite being the same color, is hard enough without going into the phylogenetic peculiarities.

Starting with animals (things that can think like you), plants (things that eat light), fungi (underground webs that bloom above ground), and bacteria (very small things that are sort-of alive, and can both be good for you or make you sick), makes things so much easier and is probably all you need to know for a while.

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

#63

Post by alexey-salmin »

card_zero wrote: post #44
alexey-salmin wrote: post #21

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.

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/correctness trade-off is appropriate in given circumstances? When teaching kids or even a non-professional adults, the appropriate level is often very heavy on the "simplicity" side. Adding more complexity results in less overall understanding, so a net-negative effect in the end.

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

#64

Post by [deleted] »

calibas wrote: 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…

[deleted]

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

#65

Post by timeon »

bregma wrote: post #56
danmur wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad to see diamond inheritance being a problem in other fields

They should rewrite biology in Rust.

Just to stay on topic, Rust Language was named after fungus. “over-engineered for survival”

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

#66

Post by mapt »

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…

But... but... every cell has one spherical nucleus, one spherical chloroplast for plants or spherical mitochondria for animals, and a host of other features depicted in this helpful diagram that you're going to have to copy from memory.

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

#67

Post by anentropic »

boxed wrote: post #31
clort wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you feed off decaying matter, hosting a colony of bugs which go out daily, bring back food and leave waste all around your environment sounds like a pretty good strategy when you don't have any way to move to better pastures?

Isn't this a long time before insects and such though?

Wikipedia says:

"evidence of arthropod boreholes in Prototaxites has been found from the early and late Devonian, suggesting the organism survived the stress of boring for many millions of years.[30] Intriguingly, boreholes appeared in Prototaxites long before plants developed a structurally equivalent woody stem, and it is possible that the borers transferred to plants when these evolved"

and for Arthropods:

"The evolutionary ancestry of arthropods dates back to the Cambrian period."

which is about 100 million years before the Devonian

also:

"The oldest known arachnid is the trigonotarbid Palaeotarbus jerami, from about 420 million years ago in the Silurian period.[82][Note 3] Attercopus fimbriunguis, from 386 million years ago in the Devonian period, bears the earliest known silk-producing spigots"

so there could have been all sorts of weird and wonderful bugs burrowing into Prototaxites I guess

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

#68

Post by johnisgood »

9dev wrote: post #61
johnisgood wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is much more to figure out what is edible and what is not. Considering shrooms alone, it is much more "complicated", so much that there are specialists for that, even, but I agree, could be an useful skill, but not for people who do not even leave the city, I think. However, they should know the basics such as "not eating potatoes (or its parts) that are green", and so forth, since that is something you run int…

I didn’t say there wasn’t. My point is that explaining to kids why they can pick a strawberry from the forest floor, but leave the fly agaric where it is, despite being the same color, is hard enough without going into the phylogenetic peculiarities. Starting with animals (things that can think like you), plants (things that eat light), fungi (underground webs that bloom above ground), and bacteria (very small things…

I agree.

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

#69

Post by TeMPOraL »

ivell wrote: post #60
TeMPOraL wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except encryption is nothing like a lock, and "stealing data" is a problematic term, as it's stretching the concept of theft way past its common meaning - it's using the term "stealing" in the exact same way people saying "software piracy is stealing" are. So that's already providing completely twisted mental model to kids. And it stems in big part from trying to pass one specific application as an answer to what the…

Substitution is a new concept for kids. Not something they can readily understand. So you need to explain that in terms of a game. Kids know what secrets are. But from their point of view, why even talk about it if it is secret? Why can't we go to another place and talk secretly? Why do we need to talk secrets in public using substitution? Since they do not see obvious need for it in their daily life and there are wo…

> Kids know what secrets are. But from their point of view, why even talk about it if it is secret? Why can't we go to another place and talk secretly? Why do we need to talk secrets in public using substitution?

Connect this to surprise gifts and birthday invites. Or another thing that resonates with them.

Explaining locks and their purpose ain't any easier. Just yesterday, my daughter asked me why I'm locking the extra set of doors we're normally keeping open, and when I told her about the just-issued warning about burglaries in our area, well, there's a lot of context to explain before a 5yo gets why locking the doors is the right thing to do in this scenario.

I mean, there's always a lot of explaining to do with kids anyway. So far, I've never had trouble giving them real explanations and letting them know when they're simplified.

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

#70

Post by Tostino »

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…

I think the problem comes in when you have adults teaching kids a simplified model who don't actually understand that is what they are doing.

It is not always conveyed well that they are learning a simplified model, or using an analogy. That's when kids feel lied to.

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