[VadeRetro]

The only people surprised by this are the staunch proponents of the "whirlwind kind build a 747" argument as applied to Prokariotes.--who are, alas, mired hopelessly in last century's active debates on this subject.

Credit where credit is due. You and Nebullis had a discussion maybe a year and a half ago in which some ideas similar to Woese's got bandied about. Among other things, you mentioned that viruses might be linear descendants of the soup rather than evolved from cellulars as more commonly thought.

[donh]

Credit where credit is due. You and Nebullis had a discussion maybe a year and a half ago in which some ideas similar to Woese's got bandied about. Among other things, you mentioned that viruses might be linear descendants of the soup rather than evolved from cellulars as more commonly thought.

I believe I can jump into the middle of that discussion right here:

http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a8ef634710e.htm#99

Using a reference of yours I saved. Woese was, in fact, the subject of this particular part of the discussion. I believe the virus quandary was pointed out earlier in the thread, but I'm a little vague about all this now.

[Nebullis]

[donh] and Nebullis had a discussion maybe a year and a half ago in which some ideas similar to Woese's got bandied about.

I believe the gist of that discussion was that the early world was an RNA replicating type world from which cellular organization later developed. Maybe you anticipated Woese's direction in thought? I had a conversation before that with Godel regarding the "shape" of the universal tree. On a later thread (you see, I never save any of this stuff--this is my time off), a thread about parity violation, if I remember correctly, I mentioned my views about life originating multiple times.