Saturday, 26 November 2011

By on November 26th, 2011 in Barbara, biology, writing

09:37 – Barbara is due back tomorrow afternoon, so tonight’s my last chance for wild women and parties. No luck so far.

I’m still working on the chapter on fungi and lichens. I’d forgotten how much I hate biological taxonomy. When Barbara and I were taking biology classes in junior high school, fungi were still classified as plants. Then in 1969 Whittaker proposed the five-kingdom system that put fungi in their own kingdom, which they richly deserved. For the next 20 years, everything went swimmingly well, until DNA analysis pretty much wiped out morphology-based taxonomies, which really messed everything up.

Imagine you had to classify four people under the old morphological taxonomy. Individuals A & B appear Nordic–very light skin, blond hair, blue eyes. Individuals C & D appear sub-Saharan African–very dark skin, brown hair, and brown eyes. Under the obsolete morphology-based taxonomy, individuals A & B clearly belong together, as do individuals C & D. But then DNA analysis comes into play, showing that individuals A & D are more closely related to each other than either is to either B or C, and that individuals B & C are more closely related to each other than either is to either A or D. So, in the new DNA-based taxonomy, individuals A & D are in one group, while individuals B & C are in another group. It makes sense scientifically, but it is non-intuitive to say the least. (Obviously, all four of these individuals are actually members of the same species and subspecies, but the point remains.)

In a more accurate example, fungi have always been considered more closely related to plants than to animals. In fact, most biology books, including recent ones, treat mycology as a sub-discipline of botany. But the reality, based on DNA analysis, is that fungi are much more closely related to animals than they are to plants. Geez.


28 Comments and discussion on "Saturday, 26 November 2011"

  1. BGrigg says:

    I’ve always considered fungi as planimals, a bit of both. It’s nice to see DNA evidence to back up one my wacky theories.

    Other wacky theories that need some form of proof:

    Slow light.
    Neutrinos cause deja vu, and are a leading cause of headaches.
    Never mind, I’m keeping the third theory on ice, or you’ll think I’m mad.

  2. Chuck Waggoner says:

    We already know you are crazy, so you might as well tell us.

  3. brad says:

    Any opinions on the latest domain seizures? As I understand it, these are considered to be illegal, since ICe doesn’t trouble themselves to provide any sort of due process. But what are you gonna do when the 800-pound gorilla takes your banana?

  4. brad says:

    That link didn’t work – let’s try again: domain seizures

  5. BGrigg says:

    I might be crazy, but I’m not stupid. Let’s just say that Velikovsky was short-sighted… 😀

  6. OFD says:

    So a vegetarian who likes to play around with hallucinogenic substances and wants to eat a shroom that has those qualities has kind of a conflict going on, eh?

  7. Chuck Waggoner says:

    My comment on the domain seizures is that this is what you get when lawyers run the country. Seizures without due process. Lawyers make the laws, then run the courts that administer the laws, which (I have lived long enough to see) do whatever they want, regardless of law, Constitution, or precedent. They are a club of elite rich, who run things for themselves, and who will always have well-paying jobs awaiting them, because they write legislation that favors businesses who are more than grateful to provide perpetual compensation well after the fact.

    Have you ever in your life heard of a US Congressman, who had an awful life of living hand to mouth after serving even one term in Congress? I just heard the story of an Enron secretary, who lost her job, ALL of her retirement money ($500,000), her husband (who also worked at Enron and died shortly after the Enron debacle, because — she said — the Enron collapse killed him), had to move in with one of her children, and has never been able to find a full-time job paying anywhere near what she earned at Enron. Do you think our lawyer Congressmen face such a situation — even if they get voted out of office after one term?

    And I say that with my dad having been a lawyer for most of his life. One telling remark he made to me a few years after becoming a lawyer, was “You’re a second-class citizen if you aren’t a lawyer.” He was right. A couple times in my life, I was having trouble dealing with some body or company, and after having written them with negative results, I turned it over to my dad. He wrote a letter on his attorney letterhead, merely repeating what I had stated, and in each instance, they offered an immediate and satisfactory settlement.

    Shakespeare was right. More than he ever would know.

  8. OFD says:

    What’s kind of funny is that most us either pretend not to notice, or simply just do NOT notice that politicians get richer while in office and are even more wealthy when they finally leave it. I guess the pretenders among us hope and think that the wealth and the power will get spread around and down to the voters and supporters. One sees this at the local level very plainly over the decades, as rewards are meted out in the form of jobs, patronage, favors, getting your kid into West Point or Yale, etc.

    And when a third of Congress are lawyers, well, there we have a group that has mastered a means of twisting the language and the rules to benefit themselves and their cronies to great effect. And from what I have seen, it really does seem to twist their minds in their process of acquiring that mastery, in law school and thereafter, a whole other order of thinking.

    This hits home very personally for me as my first wife is a lawyer, and one large reason why she is not my current wife is because of how she changed in law school and the years immediately thereafter. (and I take full responsibility for my own faults, things I did, and things I did not do, etc.)

    I doubt we should kill them all; we need the general practice guys and the constitutional experts, probably. YMMV.

  9. Chuck Waggoner says:

    The legal field is a farce, IMO. It is a fact, I believe, that democracy hinges crucially on the rule of law. But when the law is twisted to conform to a man’s whim and not the rule (I have seen this over and over), then the whole deck of cards falls.

    We need more guns in society, and fewer courts and lawyers.

  10. Chuck Waggoner says:

    BGrigg says:
    I might be crazy, but I’m not stupid. Let’s just say that Velikovsky was short-sighted… 😀

    Yeah, that’s what everybody has said about him.

    Actually, I agree with Velikovsky’s arguments about errors in history. Just think about this for a moment. At one time all history passed through a very few people — scribes — who wrote it down. Okay, so you find yourself a scribe. You have a job in front of you to copy some document that is getting crackly and the writing is disappearing. You cannot make out part of it. So — you make it up. You are educated, probably more than anyone else in society at the time. Who is to argue with you? It’s not like some error-checking computer program is going to compare what you wrote with what was on the original.

    Or else you have some political motivations. So you change some things in a document and destroy the original. Or you are just a plain, fun-loving person who likes to fool around with the truth. There are many reasons to make stuff up. And I am quite sure that is exactly what they did.

    My problem with Velikovsky is that the way he tried to change history was to justify the Bible. Also written by scribes.

  11. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    Well, I have proposed an open season on lawyers and politicians, running from December 31st to December 30th. To be fair to everyone, we would have to have a bag limit. There aren’t *that* many of them around.

    I never have been able to understand why killing them is currently illegal. That seems to me to be just an extreme form of voting. Or pest control.

  12. OFD says:

    I vote pest control.

    There should also be contests and prizes.

  13. Rick says:

    Blaming the lawyers is like blaming the gun for a murder.

    Blame our society for being more concerned about “reality” TV than about the real world.

    There are a lot of sleazy lawyers out there. There are also a lot of sleazy business owners, politicians, physicians and people in every profession. The Shakespeare quote is read out of context. The character says that, in order to establish a tyranny you must first kill all the lawyers.

    Rick in Portland

  14. brad says:

    There was a bit on the news here, a few months ago, about an ex-member of parliament. The guy was working at some menial logistics job – just as he had done before he had gone into parliament.

    The newscaster’s view was that this was some sort of sad loss of dignity. All I could think was: this is how it is *supposed* to work: go to parliament, represent people for a few years, then go back to your old life. This happens all too rarely…

  15. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    I don’t think so. A gun is an inanimate object. Lawyers are not. They define the game and set the rules to benefit themselves.

    At a minimum, to eliminate that conflict of interest, I’ve proposed that anyone who is or has been admitted to the bar should be ineligible to hold public office, elected or appointed, including judgeships. It’s obvious to any reasonable person that people who make their living practicing law should have nothing to do with creating those laws. As it is, many of our laws, made largely by lawyers, exist only to benefit lawyers.

    The inevitable result of these laws is that the US has many, many more lawyers per capita than other first-world countries, literally an order of magnitude more than some. Which also explains the high number of lawsuits in the US compared to other first-world countries. We could go a long way toward fixing that with three simple actions: (1) allow and enforce liability disclaimers, (2) again forbid lawyers from advertising, and (3) make contingency fee agreements illegal.

  16. BGrigg says:

    There was a bit on the news here, a few months ago, about an ex-member of parliament. The guy was working at some menial logistics job – just as he had done before he had gone into parliament.

    The newscaster’s view was that this was some sort of sad loss of dignity. All I could think was: this is how it is *supposed* to work: go to parliament, represent people for a few years, then go back to your old life. This happens all too rarely…

    I think far too many people think that a politician can’t be doing a good job for them, if he can’t feather his own nest. And by the use of a masculine pronoun I do not mean to infer that female politicians are any less corrupt.

    On the subject of lawyers, I think they are a bit like an issue we have in BC. One of our more socialist governments had banned hunting for wolves over a decade ago, and now the population has grown too large, and they are decimating caribou herds. There is a call for opening up the hunting again, and by the First Nation peoples, who are seeing the devastation of their main food animal. Of course the urban vote shouts them down.

    Like lawyers, wolves as individuals can be a noble breed. In packs, they become vicious marauders. Bob and Rick both raise valid points. There needs to be a cull, but not an extermination. Perhaps tag a few and put them on protected reserves, then put a $5 bounty on lawyer tongues, and dispense .22s to the teenage boys. It will be good training while the US struggles to find another country of brown people to invade.

  17. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    It will be good training while the US struggles to find another country of brown people to invade.

    Why, that’s just not fair. The US is an equal-opportunity invader. We’ve invaded countries full of red, brown, black, yellow, and white people. And if little green men do show up, we’ll probably invade their planet, too.

  18. OFD says:

    A severe culling of the herd is called for here.

    And I believe we are getting out of the invasion business, too messy. Better to sling unmanned drones all over the place, including here, and then send in spec ops teams for “surgical” strikes. You would think, then, that this change to 4G warfare would result in a significant decrease in DOD’s holy budget.

    You would be wrong.

  19. BGrigg says:

    Why, that’s just not fair. The US is an equal-opportunity invader. We’ve invaded countries full of red, brown, black, yellow, and white people. And if little green men do show up, we’ll probably invade their planet, too.

    Why, of course you are right, but I was speaking of the modern US, not the historical one. Since WWII, the predominate target seems to be brown, and I don’t accept the red, black, or yellow descriptors for skin color, not one is actually red, very few can really be called black, and any seriously yellow people have a liver issue.

    I will argue that if any little green men do show up, it is they who are invading us!

  20. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    I will argue that if any little green men do show up, it is they who are invading us!

    Of course, but I suspect they’ll come to regret it. We’d soon reverse-engineer all their spaceships, weapons, and other good stuff. China and India would start knocking out copies by the metric shitload, and before long that planet would be facing battleships and carriers full of pissed-off Marines and SEALs and Spetznaz and SAS. But I suspect the final straw would be when those poor aliens found out that a regiment of Scottish Highlanders was en route.

  21. Miles_Teg says:

    Not all former politicians have the good life. What about Randy Cunningham? Is he out of jail yet?

  22. Robert Bruce Thompson says:

    And of course, the US would lead the charge, because most of us *really* don’t like illegal aliens.

  23. BGrigg says:

    Not all former politicians have the good life. What about Randy Cunningham? Is he out of jail yet?

    One out of how many? Far too many go in poor and come out wealthy LBJ

  24. BGrigg says:

    Darn no ability to edit!

    There should be a before and after LBJ!

  25. Chuck Waggoner says:

    OFD says:
    …a third of Congress are lawyers….

    In government as a whole, it is much worse than that. Actually, until very recently, nearly 50% of the legislative branch has been lawyers. Right now, it stands at 38%. But many of the legislators’ staff are either lawyers or law students, or former paralegals from the legal industry.

    Moreover, the rules of the legislative branch are controlled by lawyers, with “on the record” interrogations of various government employees, conducted as court session inquisitions, with findings of wrongdoing similar to what a court would render. This is nonsense for fact-gathering to determine what laws should be crafted and how.

    Now, let’s combine the 3 main branches of government — legislative, judicial, and executive — and the percentage who are lawyers climbs to 80%.

    But it does not stop there. Many, many of the people appointed to run various committees, and government bureaus are lawyers. When all those are considered and added to the total at all levels of government, the figure currently runs at 46%, and that does not include the lawyers, law students, or paralegals who work for those lawyers in the various committees and government bureaus themselves.

    Furthermore, lawyers are very practiced bullies. They are able to see to it that their wishes prevail — even though their views may be in the minority. So their influence ends up being much larger than their vote and their numbers relative to the population as a whole — which is about one-half of one percent.

    I have long railed here against the singling out of people who are punished to an extreme to “set an example”. All that started with lawyers as a new concept back in the ‘70’s when I was taking a few courses from pressure by my dad to join him in his law practice. The lawyer’s message to the jury became: “We want to punish this guy so severely that it will send a message to anyone thinking of committing this crime, not to do it.”

    Even if deterrence worked — and we have more than ample evidence that it doesn’t — this is unjust. All perpetrators of the same crime, should be punished equally in a just society. But we have lawyers to thank for sending people who commit crimes where no one is physically injured, to jail for the equivalent of several life sentences. What in the hell is Bernie Madoff doing in jail? He should be working at McDonalds with a portion of his wages garnished to begin repaying the losses his company caused others. But no, our judicial system, administered solely by lawyers, wants to give him a bed, 3 square meals every day, a TV, an exercise room, and conjugal visits for a length of several times his life expectancy. I recently read a piece that indicated he is quite enjoying his life in jail, as there is no daily pressure on him anymore to perform at work. Nice going lawyers!

    Our legal system is unthinking, scoffs at research, costs waaay too much, and ignores even basic logic to justify “precedent” — and even then, I have seen (recent) cases where judges ignore precedent and clear statements of the law, because they have a personal disagreement with ruling as the law should require. We would be far better off to prevent lawyers from being judges and making ordinary people judges for short terms of a year or two. Which is what Bob proposes.

    Rick says it is not the lawyers’ fault. It is! Just as what the TV industry has degenerated to, is the fault of the people working in it, and is the reason I no longer work there, nor do I even own a TV or watch one. Meanwhile, society as a whole is watching less television than ever before, so they certainly are not responsible for what the industry is becoming, any more than society is approving the crap judges and lawyers throw at us.

    Wanna know why insurance costs so much these days? Because again, back when I was dabbling in a law education, these lawyers from Sears got their lawyer buddies in the legislature to write an exception that permitted their company, Allstate, to cream off the best risks and charge them much less, while refusing to accept the poor risks. Now the whole reason insurance works mathematically, is that in a risk pool, the good risks pay for the losses of the poor risks. Ah, but suddenly the risk pool is skewed! All the good risks left, and what we have is nothing but a poor risk pool, and the rates for them soared. The overall result is that, for most of the risk pool, insurance began costing much more per unit coverage than it had before those lawyer buddies of Sears in the legislature started messing with the risk pool.

    Before he was a lawyer, my dad worked in the insurance industry, and when people had claims, their rates never went up. But boy now they do when an accident occurs — and how! Just like me leaving TV, my dad left the insurance industry when Sears was allowed by lawyer legislators to cream the best risks out of the pool. Very profitable division that Allstate for Sears, while most other insurance carriers suffered profit hits.

    I cannot improve on Bob’s suggestions; they are excellent. But I disagree with the thought that we have too many lawyers: we have too few. That is why lawyer fees are beyond anything normal people can afford. So are doctor fees. As Dean Baker notes, the compensation of lawyers and doctors is artificially so much higher here than in all other countries of the world, because in the US, those two fields certify themselves, and thus limit the number of people admitted to practice, so there will be a purposeful shortage of them, and those who do get licensed, will earn many times more than what their actual worth to society is, where there is no shortage of them. We need to let educated foreigners with advanced qualifications into this country, to become certified as doctors and lawyers.

    One thing the OWS movement is showing, — regardless of how you feel about the participants — is just how corrupt the legal system is, by not providing the freedoms our Constitution mandates. You would expect that from foreign governments like China, but by golly — that quashing of our freedoms is exactly what we are getting in America. Let more lawyers in and cut spending on the judicial system by at least half.

  26. Miles_Teg says:

    Chuck wrote:

    “Even if deterrence worked — and we have more than ample evidence that it doesn’t — this is unjust. All perpetrators of the same crime, should be punished equally in a just society. ”

    Why do we punish people at all? To protect society by putting the crim away where he can only hurt other prisoners? To punish crims for their wrongdoing? Deterrence? I’ve tried to get my nephew’s wife (a lawyer) to discuss this but I don’t think she had much to say.

    I think deterrence works at least partially. Some crims at least try to cover their tracks because they don’t want to go inside. I’m (usually) deterred from speeding and running red lights because I don’t want the punishment.

  27. Raymond Thompson says:

    Since WWII, the predominate target seems to be brown, and I don’t accept the red, black, or yellow descriptors for skin color, not one is actually red

    I think if you were to ask people in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas those states would all say they are being invaded by brown people.

  28. BGrigg says:

    Ah, you’re forgetting your history of that area, Ray. They were there first. They’re coming home, is all.

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