Missing links

I play for team eukaryote myself, and have never thought of transitioning to prokaryote.  It would seem like abandoning complexity and specialization, and is the simple and undifferentiated life worth living?  I don't even have any friends who lack a nucleus or organelles, or who identify as unicellular (pronouns one/one).  Also, we are all detectable without a microscope.

The startling news from the world of biology is that this yawning divide, thought to have been complete billions of years ago, is not as nonbinary as we thought.

2 comments:

E Hines said...

...identify as unicellular (pronouns one/one).

I'm reading a book, The Cancer Code by Dr. Jason Fung--it's a serious treatment of the state of our understanding of cancer and of current cancer research. It seems, if Fung's thesis is accurate, that cancers are atavistic returns toward original unicellular life whose prime directive was personal survival and to hell with other unicells.

Thus, the correct pronouns would seem to be I/me.

Eric Hines

douglas said...

Ironic, isn't it?- That a late to be discovered bacterium is one visible to the naked eye!

Again we see that science gives fairly good and useful models, but often they are too simple for a complex reality, and fail.