A Wikipedia-Style Tree of Life Emerges 72
The Christian Science Monitor reports on the newly announced Open Tree of Life, a freely accessible unified interface to, and archive, of biological taxonomies. In the current version, data from nearly 500 evolutionary timelines has been assembled into a single, searchable view of all known life forms; From the CSM report:
Building the computer code and compiling the data took three years, and involved collaborators from Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, the Web development firm Interrobang, the University of Michigan, the University of Florida, Duke University, and George Washington University.
"Many participants on the project contributed hundreds of hours tracking down and cleaning up thousands of trees from the literature, then selecting 484 of them that were used to generate the draft tree of life," said Cody Hinchliff, a scientist from the University of Idaho, in the announcement.
Re:Christian Science Monitor (Score:5, Insightful)
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I have been atheist/agnostic for over 50yrs, ... Unlike Isaac Newton, I have never heard them spewing religious nonsense at their audience.
So for about 90% of your life so far, you were religious?
Re:Christian Science Monitor (Score:4, Informative)
This should have been in the summary. For those who don't know:
- Christian Science as a religion has strong anti-science beliefs, including rejection of modern medicine in favour of prayer. BUT ...
- The CSM newspaper is a highly respected news source, mostly independent from the religion except for a daily editorial. Think of it as being sponsored by the church.
It has won seven Pulitzer Prizes.
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The CSM newspaper is a highly respected news source, mostly independent from the religion except for a daily editorial. Think of it as being sponsored by the church.
I'm not American, so I've never read the newspaper, although I am aware of the religion, and the phrase "mostly independent" sounds worrying.
How can you tell which bits are influenced by what is frankly a bizarre and dangerous religion?
If you genuinely believe that illness is an illusion that can be cured by prayer, this must make it impossible to accept any biological science at all.
If all the editors and journalists are not Christian Scientists themselves, why would they want to be associated with t
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As a journalism major, one of my projects was to evaluate the quality of different news sources. CSM ranked in that project as a very high quality newspaper. The religion of their founder includes "tell the truth" among its foundational tenets, and over 100 years, they've allowed that to take priority over the rest of their philosophy, even in medical reporting, which is the area where Christian Science and actual science differ the most.
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As a journalism major, one of my projects was to evaluate the quality of different news sources. CSM ranked in that project as a very high quality newspaper. The religion of their founder includes "tell the truth" among its foundational tenets, and over 100 years, they've allowed that to take priority over the rest of their philosophy, even in medical reporting, which is the area where Christian Science and actual science differ the most.
But how could you trust that the stupid religion was completely separate from the newspaper?
Eddy used older meaning of science (Score:2)
Kardashian? (Score:4, Funny)
I can't find "Kardashian" in there. I figured it would at least show up under one of the various forms of uncultured bacterium.
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"Assius Giganticus"
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Actually in latin it would be: giganteas asinum
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More like gluteus maximus maximus
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Yes we all know she is burdened with a big ass. Which is why you should never rush into a marriage.
Re: Kardashian? (Score:2)
Fornicare hoc stercum
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See, they wouldn't be in there, because Kardashians are aliens.
Or is that Cardassians? Something like that.
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Hey everybody, I found Jay Leno's /. account!
Almost Cool (Score:4, Interesting)
It'd be cooler if it was general public friendly. Scientists might find it useful but the general public will have no use for something they can't understand. Really though it seems like they're just copying others databases (primarily NCBI and SILVA) which have "trees" of their own.
Very Cool (Score:2)
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Yet it harvests much of the data from a closed RNA database...
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It's like making an English dictionary, except way worse.
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That's kinda my point. "wiki" style is really only useful if you have the general public involved. By harvesting the generic data (names/trees) from other databases all it's really doing is indexing sources scientists would already go to for the real data (ie: paywalled information). Without the real data behind it or something for the general public I can't see it being hugely useful to anyone imo.
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Now it just needs complete genome sequences... (Score:2)
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'ex' ians? Just typing 'Xians' shows what a cunt you are.
The Christian Science Monitor is always (when I read it) a refreshingly objective and sane publication that talks rationally about science.
Re: Xians hate science as their... (Score:2)
Get a clue. Chi(-Rho) has long been used as shorthand for "Christianity" (itself a recent notion), to wit: Xmas.
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I don't use that abbreviation either.
Exmas? Really? No. Laziness from lazy fuckwits that can't spell.
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Exmas? Really? No. Laziness from lazy fuckwits that can't spell.
Welcome to the Internet, you must be new here...
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Get a clue. Chi(-Rho) has long been used as shorthand for "Christianity" (itself a recent notion), to wit: Xmas.
True, but your average Christian wingnut finds "Xmas" offensive too, against all reason.
Which day (Score:1)
But does it say on which day God created them?
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Is there a prize? (Score:1)
...for navigating from the top down to homo sapiens without using the search facility?
The Tree of Life can't Handle Open Source (Score:3)
Just the odd observation, but the treelike organisation is suitable for well defined species, in other words when lifeforms act pretty much according to closed source strategies (but not completely). According to some smart people in the beginning the dominant organisation was open source, lots of exchange.
The open source thing still happens of course, and it's fascinating when it happens. It gets the news sometimes when the subject is Influenza.
There was an important article almost 50 years ago (Symbiogenesis, see Lynn Margulis) stating that some components of the eukaryotic cell have actually been imported from prokaryotes: mitochondria and organelles.
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Oh yeah, there were and still are loads of exchanges of functionality in biology.
Parasitic organisms living off others, occasionally will accidentally become absorbed in to the DNA of the creature, or even in some cases deliberate like with retroviral strains.
Some of these have even been linked to cancers whenever they become activated for whatever reason. (why they sometimes activate is something under heavy research right now ever since we found that out since it could provide a huge avenue of attack aga
Open Source can't Handle Open Source (Score:2)
Open source mutations (Score:2)
OTOH a "tree of life" doesn't really care about how the mutations occurred because 'species' is a some
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But at that time there wasn't as much proof for it. It's official now :)
graphical Harvard museum effort not available (Score:3)
It's really too bad that the fabulous museum exhibit display Deep Tree [harvard.edu] isn't more broadly available. There is a lovely display, with graphical interface, which is just enchanting to wander through much of the tree of life. It does a great job conveying the scale of the diversity of life and the boggling number of species, and it's aimed at the general public. It has nice pinch/zoom/etc. touch-screen functionality on a table-sized display. Unfortunately, for years, there was exactly one place on earth where you could play with it: at the Harvard Natural History Museum. And unless you are there at a particularly empty time, you will have to squeeze a fair number of kids out of the way to actually play with it for more than about two minutes. Now, things have improved a bit and it looks like there are a grand total of four museums [harvard.edu] that have the exhibit. (You should visit if there is one near you, try to avoid a time when school field trips are likely to be there!) The development was supported by a $2.3 million US National Science Foundation grant [nsf.gov] so public money was used to develop it, and it seems feasible to implement it or at least a scaled-down version of it on what are now much more common multi-touch displays like tablets or at least be available on the web, but as far as I can tell, it's been years since the grant and still the only place you can use it is in these four museums. I see this as a missed opportunity for a dramatic broader impact on understanding evolution and the scale of the diversity of life.
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It's really too bad that the fabulous museum exhibit display Deep Tree [harvard.edu] isn't more broadly available. .
Aha, happy to be mistaken and outdated on this one- I looked and found that now there is a web page via NOVA with a good interesting subset of the data. It's nicely done and at the DeepTree link at this link [pbs.org].
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On my list of things to do should I ever inexplicably become astonishingly wealthy is to build a museum of phylogeny.
It would be a natural history museum, but with exhibits organized phylogenetically and the phylogeny would be represented by lines (mostly on the floor but branching out onto walls where needed) with a scale of something like 1 meter to 1 million years. (There would need to be an ongoing process of updating as scientific consensus changes.)
If you want to know how closely related you are to a
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That is really cool, I didn't know about those. Thanks.
For the sake of practicality, they'd probably be 600m from H. sapiens in the Ediacaran building, plus there'd be little sign beside the path from 'origin of life' to the main museum, at 2 km, to mark the correct location.
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This museum had better have it's buildings on rails, so they can be shuffled around.
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I've been at the exhibition in the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien [nhm-wien.ac.at], and I've seen the fossils (or at least quite convincing replicas of them), and they looked like some type of small, round pillows with large braids. So to a non-palaeontologist like me, the
Re: graphical Harvard museum effort not available (Score:2)
But with so many of these very ancient "fossils" you have to be extremely careful about misidentifying inorganic features as fossils. Witness "School's Embarrassment", the continuing dispute over "Moiz
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I didn't know about the Vienna connection. If I had, I might have visited it when the wife and I were in the German Alps last year. I'll file that in the memory for future use.
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When the American Museum of Natural History in New York redid the fourth floor exhibits about dinosaurs, they chose to arrange the specimens in a tree-like structure representing their phylogeny (well, subject to the constraint that it's basically a big loop with a few bumps and nooks and crannies.) At the time (this was the late 1990s,) it was controversial because most museums grouped specimens by function (carnivores, herbivores, etc.) instead of by their evolutionary path. In fact, the AMNH welcomin
You are here (Score:2)
Eukaryota > Opisthokonta > Holozoa > Metazoa > * > * > * > Bilatera > * > Deuterostomia > Chrodata > * > Craniata > Vertebrata > Gnathostomata > Teleostomi > Eutelostomi > Sarcopterygii > Dinotetrapodomorpha > Tetrapoda > Amniota > Mammalia > Theria > Eutheria > Boreoeutheria > Euarchontoglires > * > Primates> Haplorrhini > Simiiformes > Catarrhini > Hominoidea > Hominindae > * > Homininae > * > Homo
Slashdot editors are asleep again. (Score:2)
The Christian Science Monitor reports on the newly announced Open Tree of Life, a freely accessible unified interface to, and archive, of biological taxonomies.
A crucial comma is in totally the wrong place there. It should say:
The Christian Science Monitor reports on the newly announced Open Tree of Life, a freely accessible unified interface to, and archive of, biological taxonomies.
Wikispecies? (Score:3)
Isn't this already being done with Wikispecies.org (https://species.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page)?
Catch phrases: "The free species directory that anyone can edit." "Wikispecies is free, because life is in the public domain!"
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Another good resource (Score:2)
Amborella Wars (Score:2)
Wonderful - now all the scientific feuding over whether Amborella is the basal angiosperm can spill over into wiki edit wars.
(Amborella trichopoda is a New Caledonian flowering plant (angiosperm) with no close relatives. The deepest split in the angiosperm phylogeny may be Amborella splitting from everything else. Much ink and enmity has been spent on whether or not this is so. Here [tolweb.org] is a summary I found, although on a skim read I suspect it was written by a partisan.)
No multiple inheritance... so far (Score:2)
It is inevitable that some organism has inherited so much of its genome by reverse transcriptase etc as to muddy the question of exactly what it descended from. Then artificial species will start showing up and it alls gets even messier than it is now. I wonder if it could eventually have cycles.
called horizontal transfer (Score:2)
http://tolweb.org/ (Score:2)
http://tolweb.org/ [tolweb.org]
Is also a Tree Of Life project, but unlike OpenTree, it have pictures and descriptions and it also contains extinct species.
For examples for Aves:
https://tree.opentreeoflife.or... [opentreeoflife.org]
http://tolweb.org/Aves [tolweb.org]