The (not really) Official Endgame Summon Thread!

[HoneyBadger]

There seems to be a bit of confusion between "animals" and "mammals" or atleast lower (single celled, simple invertibrates, etc.) and higher (multi-celled: insects, lizards, dinosaurs, mammals, birds, etc) animals.

Every living thing started out as an animal. Plants evolved *after* animals did, and infact were the cause of one of the earliest mass extinctions on the planet when they did evolve, because at the time oxygen was a deadly poison to most forms of animal life. There are still animals on Earth which survive and flourish in anoxic conditions, such as the bacteria that cause gangrene or boccilism.

Note: A biologist I am not, nor am I a geneticist. So I'm not claiming to know for certain, but to my latest understanding, plants, mammals, and higher forms of animals that are related to mammals, are closer genetically than we are to some other forms of animals, including several different types of bacteria, and other very primitive orders of animal, which may have split off into separate families before plants even existed.

[Lingchih]

http://i27.tinypic.com/2h6yet5.jpg

Nuff said.

[llamabeast]

Bacteria are not animals.

Animals basically are only things we think of as animals - insects, birds etc.. There are a couple of freaky exceptions, but almost all animals are multicellular. And even the unicellular ones are eukaryotes, which means their cells are far larger and more complex than those of bacteria (which are prokaryotes, meaning they have simple cells with no nucleus).

[HoneyBadger]

Well, I hate to tell you, Llamabeast, but everything that exists, that we have knowledge of, is what we decide it is.

Plants and animals both have a list of characteristics that define them. If a given creature meets the definition of an "animal", then it's an animal. If it meets the definition of a "plant", then it's a plant. If it only subscribes to the definition of a "bacterium", then that's what it is, which still means that bacteria evolved and split into families over time, and some of those families came before plants, and some of them came after.

Fire, for that matter, meets most of the requirements to be defined as "living". It eats, reproduces, produces waste, requires oxygen. The only things that I can think of offhand that separate it dramatically from every living thing on the Earth is that it doesn't require water and has no cellular or DNA structure that we recognise. So perhaps it's an alien lifeform. Certainly other forms of alien life that have been espoused have been more far-fetched.

I suppose I should have said "heterotroph" instead of "animal", because it would fit what I mean a little more clearly, but it's a little tricky to nail down any specific trait, when we're trying to make classifications of various evolutionary quantities and qualities, over the billions of years this discussion requires. So I say "animal" in opposition to "plant".

Regardless, I'm still pretty sure that multicellular, eucaryotic animals evolved before plants did, and that plants aren't all that far removed from us, compared to several other branches of DNA coded life, on our particular branch of the Evolutionary tree.

[llamabeast]

Obviously you can call anything whatever you want. However, "animal" has an accepted meaning, in the same way that "mammal" does. The accepted meaning of "animal" is, I believe, well-defined.

Using the accepted meaning of words (and we're pretty stuff if we don't, I'd say), I'm 95% sure animals came after plants. If they didn't, what would they eat?

Your fire point is an interesting one. Some more modern views of life see it primarily as a means for transmitting and propagating information through time. That would be where fire fails (the only information it transmits is pretty much a binary on-fire/not-on-fire bit). Otherwise you're right that fire seems to tick a lot of boxes.

The underlying reason that fire looks like life is this. Life takes in ordered, high energy "food" and breaks it down to a high-entropy, low-energy waste in order to fuel the propagation of its own information. Fire similarly reduces "food" to waste, but doesn't couple the process to any entropy-decreasing/information-creating processes like life does.

Of course the viewpoint where life is essentially an information propagation system has quirky consequences, such as self-replicating computer programs being "alive". Similarly good jokes are "alive" in that they are adept at reproducing and spreading themselves, often even adapting to improve their performance (people change the joke a bit and the better version gets retold more often).

[MaxWilson]

I think if you had said "heterotroph" instead of "animal" you would not have gotten the "Hunh??!!" reaction. Rather you would have gotten, "Well, duh."

"Animal" is pretty well-defined as belonging to the kingdom animalia, which excludes bacteria, for instance. If there were fungi which were genetically closer to humans than some animals, even very simple ones, it would mean there was probably something very strange going on with transgenic migration. That would be interesting, but apparently it's not what you meant.

-Max

[Lingchih]

MaxWilson said:
I think if you had said "heterotroph" instead of "animal" you would not have gotten the "Hunh??!!" reaction. Rather you would have gotten, "Well, duh."

"Animal" is pretty well-defined as belonging to the kingdom animalia, which excludes bacteria, for instance. If there were fungi which were genetically closer to humans than some animals, even very simple ones, it would mean there was probably something very strange going on with transgenic migration. That would be interesting, but apparently it's not what you meant.

-Max

Well, I haven't really been following this post for a while, but yes, there are fungi which are closer genetically to animals than plants, in the same way that corals, although appearing plantlike, are actually animals.

I'm an experienced, although technically amateur, Mycologist. I can look up the scientific papers on this, if you like, though I would rather spend my time playing Dominions.