{"id":308,"date":"2011-11-26T10:37:34","date_gmt":"2011-11-26T14:37:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/?p=308"},"modified":"2011-11-26T10:38:21","modified_gmt":"2011-11-26T14:38:21","slug":"saturday-26-november-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/2011\/11\/26\/saturday-26-november-2011\/","title":{"rendered":"Saturday, 26 November 2011"},"content":{"rendered":"

09:37 –<\/span> Barbara is due back tomorrow afternoon, so tonight’s my last chance for wild women and parties. No luck so far.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

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.
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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.)
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

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.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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

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,<\/p>\n

 » Read more about: Saturday, 26 November 2011  »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,6,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-barbara","category-biology","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ttgnet.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}