Re: Most important paper in evolutionary biology


"r norman" <NotMyRealEmail@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:dg72hb$24g6$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> I don't know the original papers, but what about the discovery of the
> Prokaryotes,

Mostly took place before my arbitrary 50 year limit.

> Margulis and the origin of eukaryotic organelles,

My impression is that Margulis didn't originate the idea - she merely
beat the drums for it. Also, she was not the one who discovered the
telling evidence in favor of the idea - the fact that rRNA sequences
show the organelles to be closely related to alpha proteobacteria and
cyanobacteria.

However, I will agree that it may be the most important discovery
in evolutionary biology in the past 50 years. Unfortunately, you can't
localize that discovery to a single important paper.

> Whittaker's five kingdoms,

Wikipedia suggest these as the key papers:
Whittaker, R.H. (1959). On the broad classification of organisms.
Quart. Rev. Biol. 34: 210-226.
Whittaker, R.H. (1969). New concepts of kingdoms of organisms.
Science 163: 150-160.

> Woese's Archea?
Again, as suggested by Wikipedia:
Woese, Carl R.; Fox, George E. (1977).
Phylogenetic Structure of the Prokaryotic Domain: The Primary Kingdoms.
PNAS 74 (11): 5088?5090.
Woese, Carl R., Kandler, Otto, Wheelis, Mark L (1990).
Towards a natural system of organisms: Proposal for the domains Archaea,
Bacteria, and Eucarya.
PNAS 87 (12): 4576?4579.

> All of these really shook
> the foundations of how we categorize all life on earth.

Agreed. Of these, I prefer Woese because it was based upon new data,
using unfamiliar (to many) methods. By contrast, Whittaker was merely
suggesting a reorganization of known information. Everyone already
knew that the Fungi, Protists, and Bacteria existed. The only confusion
was as to whether it was useful to try to shoehorn them into the two
kingdoms.


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