RE: Mice given bat-like forelimbs through gene switch

[Tim Williams <twilliams_alpha@hotmail.com>]

Jura wrote:


> This has nothing to do with biology teachers. This is what is written in all 
> the textbooks. Now I 
> realize, as many others have, that textbooks aren't exactly renowned for 
> their stunning accuracy, 
> but this is quite literally the first thing that these books talk about. This 
> usually pops up in the first 
> couple pages of the first chapter. If this really was an erroneous statement, 
> then I believe it would 
> have been caughtand fixed in the textbooks long before I was born.


Sorry, but I refuse to believe that a textbook would actually say this.  Nor do 
I believe that any self-respecting textbook would refer to a virus as "single 
celled" (another statement of yours).  If I had to hazard a guess I'd say that 
certain biological terms are being conflated or confused, and I doubt that the 
textbook is the guilty party.  The Biology 101/Anatomy 101 study notes issued 
by the teachers(s) are perhaps to blame, rather than the textbooks they are 
purportedly based on.  (Of course, I could be wrong; there could be shonky 
textbooks out there that are re-inventing biological terms.)


> Single celled organism is an oxymoron. Yeah, it is
> used a lot, but that doesn't make it correct. 


This really depends on who "it is used a lot" by.  Considering that the term 
"single celled organism" is used by scientists who work with single celled 
organisms (bacteria, archaea, or unicellular eukaryotes), that makes the term 
as correct as it can be.  The term "micro-organism" has the same currency.


Cheers, 
Tim
_________________________________________________________________
Connect and share in new ways with Windows Live.
http://www.windowslive.com/share.html?ocid=TXT_TAGHM_Wave2_sharelife_012008