Re: "Professional" Three Domain Classification crushed?

["David Marjanovic" <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

Why didn't you just write "'Professional' (Eu)bacteria paraphyletic?" in the
subject line? That's all what Cavalier-Smith says in the abstract at
http://ijs.sgmjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/52/1/7 (pdf requires an
institutional subscription :.-( ). I'm totally flabbergasted by his
statement that he uses palaeontological evidence to arrive at his new
phylogeny and then says "Fossil evidence is compelling for the extreme
antiquity of eubacteria [over 3500 million years (My)] <his brackets, not
mine> but, like their eukaryote sisters, archaebacteria probably arose only
850 My ago", ignoring heaps of fossil eukaryotes up to 2.1 Ga old. Maybe he
means 2850 Ma (which would be oddly precise but fits ?2.7 Ga old archaean
and dinoflagellate chemofossils IIRC)? Quantum physicists will do scary
things with him when they find out that he uses the term "quantum evolution"
to describe fast evolution (adaptive radiation, like what happens after mass
extinctions). My personal comment is that it's, erm, unexpected to find an
organism capable of complicated photosynthesis and possessing 2 cell
membranes along with a peptidoglycan cell wall at the base of all life.

> The neomuran origin of archaebacteria, the negibacterial root of the
> universal tree and bacterial megaclassification.

This title is a bit circular -- neomura (always lower case in the abstract)
is his new name for the clade (Archaea + Eukaryota), and Negibacteria is his
new name for the paraphyletic gram-negative bacteria.