School Dictionary

In 2001, a team from Tel Aviv University argued that B. permians were almost identical to a strain of modern bacteria, Bacillus marismortui, found in the Dead Sea. Only two of its genetic sequences differed, and then only slightly. БЂњAre we to believe,БЂ«the Israeli researchers wrote, БЂњthat in 250 million years B. permians has accumulated the same amount of genetic differences that could be achieved in just 3-7 days in the laboratory?БЂ«In reply, Vreeland suggested that БЂњbacteria evolve faster in the lab than they do in the wild.БЂ«Maybe. It is a remarkable fact that well into the space age, most school textbooks divided the world of the living into just two categories-plant and animal. Microorganisms hardly featured. Amoebas and similar single-celled organisms were treated as proto-animals and algae as proto-plants. Bacteria were usually lumped in with plants, too, even though everyone knew they didnБЂ™t belong there. As far back as the late nineteenth century the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel had suggested that bacteria deserved to be placed in a separate kingdom, which he called Monera, but the idea didnБЂ™t begin to catch on among biologists until the 1960s and then only among some of them. (I note that my trusty American Heritage desk dictionary from 1969 doesnБЂ™t recognize the term.) Many organisms in the visible world were also poorly served by the traditional division ...»