Re: Cope's rule and bacterial evolution


<anon1@xxxxxxx> wrote in message news:dt86sa$2u0h$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
PiP:
Extrapolating backward we can imagine that the LUCA (Last Universal
Common Ancestor) was the most versatile and generalist micro-organism
of them all, and had the biggest genome.

Or maybe there was no single LUCA. Did you ever consider that possibility?

Sure. How could I not consider it when there are big names like
Woese and Margulis promoting it and leveler heads like Doolittle
taking it seriously.

You talk like it's been mathematically proven there must have been a
single LUCA, and all we need to do is figure out how it was.

I continue to think that the idea of a single LUCA (with only occasional
HGT since then and only a very few cases of endosymbiosis) is the most
fruitful hypothesis to drive research. In fact, I doubt that complete
fusion of genomes was particularly important at any time since protein
synthesis and the unpartitioned cytoplasm.

[snip long speculation along conventional lines]

If I ever become
famous for any of these hairbrained ideas of mine, and somebody wonders
where I got the ideas from, just look here, if Google preserves their
archive of newsgroups all that time, which is not guaranteed!)

Well, I didn't notice any "hairbrained ideas" in this posting which
could make you famous. I've heard almost all of those ideas before.
In any case, you don't become famous just for having ideas. You need
to back the ideas up with fact and argument and convince a lot of
other people that you are correct.

Everyone's favorite example of a vindicated "crackpot" these days is
Wegner, but he had to write quite a large number of good scholarly
papers on his ideas just to keep them in the collective consciousness
until a revised version of his ideas came to prominence in the 1960s.


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