
Microbiologist Carl Woese changed the way we think about evolution - yaseen-rob
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/13/magazine/evolution-gene-microbiology.html
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vibrio
This makes me happy. Carl Woese has been one of my scientific heroes for
decades. The magnitude of his contributions have been very much under
appreciated. On top of that, David Quammen is one of my favorite
science/nature writers. I am eager to read the book.

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jhbadger
Yes, as somebody who worked with Carl in my grad school days I appreciated
that article. However, I think the book mostly focuses on the next generation
of molecular evolutionists (Ford Doolittle, Bill Martin, etc.). I remember
reading Nick Lane's "The Vital Question" a couple of years ago and I was
annoyed that Woese got like one sentence and Lane made it seem like Martin had
come up with his ideas in a vacuum. I'm glad that it looks like Quammen is at
least going to put their ideas in the context of what Woese did.

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dnautics
I was told by an _unreliable source_ that it was W E Balch who pushed Woese to
think about them being their own domain - although certainly aprochyphal, that
doesn't surprise me given Bill's personality.

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vibrio
Bill himself rather flatly told me something along those lines, though I’ve
heard various other accounts / opinions. I don’t doubt anyone. Blurred
contributions seem inherent to “a-ha” data interpretation moments on
science—(as much as “a-ha moment” is how it really happens)

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dnautics
that may have been my unreliable source.

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yters
HGT is consistent with a dependency graph of life: [http://bio-
complexity.org/ojs/index.php/main/article/viewArt...](http://bio-
complexity.org/ojs/index.php/main/article/viewArticle/BIO-C.2018.3)

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pranjalv123
Don't all time-dependent processes result in dependency graphs? The only way
you could have a circular dependency is if one organism was a parent of one of
their ancestors, which is obviously impossible*

*actually, it's not impossible, since you could have a child transmit DNA horizontally to its parent, but this would in reality happen over a sufficiently short timescale that you wouldn't see it on a phylogenetic tree.

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DoreenMichele
No clue what you are talking about, but, technically, human women become
chimeras when they reproduce because the baby leaves behind some of its
genetic material. Human children transmit their DNA to their mothers in utero
to some degree.

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dnautics
one of my graduate advisors, William E Balch, was around in the Woese lab at
the time. He was doing much of the methanogen 16S RNA work at the time, the
data that spurred the idea to break from prokarya (till RNA analysis all they
had was phenotypic observation). The methanogens need to be cultured in a
reductive environment, and you do that by maintaining a 1% hydrogen in
nitrogen atmosphere; and there was, apparently, once a grad student who
accidentally lit the whole thing on fire and somehow survived the explosion.

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selimthegrim
His theory with Goldenfeld about horizontal evolution enrages me but
Goldenfeld has so many interesting and good ideas a few of them are bound to
be right by chance anyway at this rate.

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j7ake
The writing really made this sound like an adventure! But why was Mitchell
Sogin not part of the 1977 paper?

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8bitsrule
Some damn fine science-writing, this.

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yters
Do they know the mechanism of HGT?

