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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

#71

Post by scryers_bloom »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #21
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…

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 love your point that avoiding oversimplifications leads to disaster. It explains why I struggle to have a purist mindset while also unable to explain why things go poorly sometimes.

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

#72

Post by idiotsecant »

mmooss wrote: post #12
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…

> 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…

Yes I agree. 4 humors were enough for medieval europe, they're good enough for me!! Who can remember all this complicated 'germ theory of disease' liberal junk?! There must be hundreds of these supposed 'germs' out there! No sir, no thank you!

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

#73

Post by Ultimatt »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #13
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…

And then there are viruses, which don't show up on the tree of life at all because there's no consensus that they even constitute "life."

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 biomass. Viruses are just this, their biome isn't the wider one you participate in instead they are sub-cellular life, in the same way you are sub-planetary life. Humans don't make the oxygen atmosphere on the planet themselves, they parasitize this feature of planets from other life. In the same way viruses use cellular machinery.

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

#75

Post by MITSardine »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #21
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…

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…

To be fair, "functional analysis is infinite dimensional linear algebra" is a saying for a reason, that's an intuition a good professor should have given you. Mine gave me it so well, I still see no difference between R^n and a Hilbert space! (on the dangers of intuitions)

This reminds me of a short lived stretch in French mathematical education, the "Bourbaki years". For those unaware, Nicolas Bourbaki was "a dozen mathematicians in a trench coat" who, in the early 20th, reformed mathematics from the ground up, their work is notoriously opaque (to some, perhaps a revelation to others), if rigorous. It served as inspiration for ambitious mathematics education reforms in the 60s and 70s.

Some of the things my father had to contend with:

- naive set theory and non-10 basis arithmetic in primary school (age 7)

- set theory in early middle school (ages 10/11), maps over sets, so I imagine things like injectivity and bijections. "[...] a different approach of arithmetic, computations often replaced by a more abstract theoretical approach": I wonder how that went in the classroom

- general Algebra introduced at 15yo, groups, rings, fields, vector spaces; 16yo mostly linear algebra (vector spaces, linear mappings etc; in true French fashion I'll bet they didn't see many 2x2 or 3x3 matrices that year)

I'm quoting Wikipedia "Mathématiques modernes" here, my father only told me of the last point himself. Though I do have his notebooks from early higher ed, they had general topology before metric space topology, for example, in year 1 or 2 (probably 1, because how can you do anything before you know topology...). It was all like this, a theory that builds on itself and you can't skip any steps. A finite dimensional space is a particular case of an infinite dimensional one, so you start with the latter. Backwards from how things were constructed and are understood by people.

The fact these reforms survived about 10 years and have been completely reverted is testament that this approach probably doesn't work.

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

#77

Post by Ultimatt »

adrian_b wrote: post #40
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…

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…

I dunno you can mostly solve for this, look at the majority share of the genome in a compartment with a single membrane contained by the outer membrane (by definition for endosymbiogenesis), with the DNA molecules containing the highest quantity of coding gene content. That's the thing you do the cladistic descent on. Just because I'm carrying a load of bacterial symbionts that are better at digesting wheat doesn't make me a different species to humans who mostly eat rice. That I eventually carry those as an endosymbiont then eventually just a sack of genes doesn't really change who' was the boss in this situation, or who I'm able to reproduce with that entire time as a species either. Symbiogenesis is very much like this, look at Hatena arenicola if you want to see this emerging to see how it interacts with descent. This is really the difference between understanding reproductive relationships specifically, vs wider ecology. I agree that symbiogenesis is like this weird one where its both only going to happen through other ecological relationships and then reproduction. But there really is a clear cut time one turns into the other, with the fate of one of those organisms of the combination "winning" even though profoundly altered. Symbiodinium is probably another good example, it has loads of ecological partners and little remnants of all of those histories in its genetic material and organelle arrangement. But its still an obvious species, with all the other oddball dinoflagellates that act and look like it also appearing to have some common descent from something much simpler and eukaryotic.

As a programmer symbiogenesis is a mixin or interface not a class.

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

#79

Post by adrian_b »

Ultimatt wrote: post #77
adrian_b wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I dunno you can mostly solve for this, look at the majority share of the genome in a compartment with a single membrane contained by the outer membrane (by definition for endosymbiogenesis), with the DNA molecules containing the highest quantity of coding gene content. That's the thing you do the cladistic descent on. Just because I'm carrying a load of bacterial symbionts that are better at digesting wheat doesn't m…

It is not that simple, because a large part of the genes that originally belonged to the mitochondria or to the chloroplasts have been transferred into the nucleus and they are now completely integrated into it, even if evolution trees will show that those genes have a different history than the remainder of the nucleus.

So even if you want to use only the DNA inside the nucleus for a cladistic classification, that does not produce a tree of evolution, but only a directed graph of genetic information flows, with many important hybridization events. While initially mitochondria and chloroplasts were just symbionts, like the useful bacteria in the human gut, eventually that symbiosis has become a full hybridization, with mixing and integration of the genetic information.

The official cladistic classification produces a tree from the directed graph of the evolution by cutting the branches that are considered to be less important.

Sometimes this is indeed the best choice, but there are contexts in which the genetic information brought through the minor branches is actually that which determines most of the importance of an organism in an ecosystem.

E.g. in many contexts the most important feature of a living being is whether it is an oxygenic phototroph due to inheriting genetic information from some blue-green algae, i.e. that it is a primary producer in the ecosystem, and not the features that depend on which is the exact eukaryotic group from which most of its nucleus has been inherited. For instance, it is more frequently useful to group together brown algae with red algae (whose chloroplasts share a common ancestor), than to group brown algae with some non-phototrophic stramenopiles (which share a common ancestor for most of the nuclear DNA), with which they share only inherited characters that need an electron microscope for detection.

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

#80

Post by exe34 »

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?

I love the idea that fungi house the Polises of Greg Egan.
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