To: Doctor Stochastic; js1138
Can I play?
My candidate would be class insecta. I'm confident about numerous and adaptive, less so about indestructible. Aphids seem awfully squishy, mosquitoes get eaten at an alarming rate by bats and dragonflies.
To: From many - one.; Doctor Stochastic
Bacteria is the most numerous form of life in terms of any number of measures: raw numbers of individuals, numbers of species, genetic range between different species, ubiquity in differing environments, and even, perhaps, biomass (the argument here relies on the empirically somewhat shaky speculation that bacteria prosper throughout at least the outer crust of the earth, fed by geothermal rather than solar energyan argument needed to get their biomass over that of plant life, which otherwise easily dominates due to the weight of the worlds forests). In terms of numbers, bacteria are by far the most numerous of organisms on Earth. They also make up most of the living biomass on Earth. Unfortunately, I'm unaware of any actual estimate of the number of bacterial cells on Earth. In fact, we don't even have a very good estimate of the number of different species of bacteria. What we do know is that there are over 1000 species of bacteria living inside of us, with 300 species of bacteria in a person's mouth alone, and that we have 10 times as many bacterial cells as blood cells in our bodies.
158 posted on
11/03/2005 4:28:41 AM PST by
js1138
(Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.)
To: From many - one.
My candidate would be class insecta. I'm confident about numerous and adaptive, less so about indestructible. You can kill an individual bug. It matters so little it doesn't even make the rest of them mad. Scary.
188 posted on
11/03/2005 6:21:41 AM PST by
VadeRetro
(Liberalism is a cancer on society. Creationism is a cancer on conservatism.)
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