Anomalous Archaebacteria:

A clue to the taxonomically challenged about our heritage?

The tree of life

We are not alone?

The various divisions of the Earth's diverse creatures.

Each segment of the "deep dish" biological pie stands for the relative abundance by mass of each type of life.

Encased within our genetic inheritance is the record of races long extinct.

But with some cousins its harder to explain their relations with other family members.

For that reason the common genes along each different species' genome are compared to find similar codons.

Genes are actually stretches of chromosomes that can be interpreted and translated in to proteins by stretches of duplicating molecules called RNA.

By tracing similar strands of the DNA that are translated by RNA into proteins, there is a means to determine what organisms share hereditary material and thus reveal their common ancestry with other animals that have these same proteins.

Human chromosomes, for example share over 98 percent of the base pair sequences with our closest relatives the chimpanzees.

Experts believe we are derived from a common ancestor with today's chimpanzees over seven million years ago.

There are several competing ways of visualizing our genetic inheritance.

Two Rival trees:

1. Six
2. Five

Six Kingdoms and Two Domains,

	Prokaryota
Eubacteria	<- (Monerans) ->	Archaebacteria
	Protoctists fission
	Eukaryota
Fungi spores	Plants embryo	Animals blastula

or

	Five kingdom system **
	• Monera
	Ediacarian amalgamation & symbiosis
	• Protoctista *
• Fungi		• Animals
	• Plants

* “first established beings” 250,000 species, p. 65

** Diagram, p. 31

Next

This dialectic grows ever older with every step taken in this "garden of forking paths."

JVS

Vernal Equinox, 04

“Evolution is simply all history.”
“change through time...the convoluted history of which we are the living legacy”

Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet, p. 24.

“Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution.”

Theodosius Dobzhansky
quoted in Symbiotic Planet, p. 24.

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