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Creatures from the Black Lagoon:
Lessons in the Diversity and
Evolution of Eukaryotes (1 of 5)
by Scott Dawson
I’ve organized this lecture into
several parts, beginning with a history of biological classification
of life — especially in the context of microorganisms. I also want to talk about the diversity and lifestyle of microbes
(protists in particular) that live without oxygen and why this is
relevant to the evolution of life — especially with respect to
eukaryotic evolution. Then I’m going to discuss how the majority
of microbial life is yet to be discovered, and how one might find new
microbes of interest to the study of evolution. And lastly, I’ll
talk about some new local monsters we've found — microbial
creatures from the Black Lagoon, where they live (just in case you
want to check them out), and why they could change our understanding
of eukaryotic evolution.
So, to start, I think when I first I learned
about evolution there was always an implied "march of progress," or a
linear progression from one form of life to a next, higher and
higher, up the evolutionary ladder. This notion usually begins with
some primordial soup — progressing to bacteria — to
protist — to plant to animal — bugs — to us. But
we know this is false. Evolution is branching — or at least
that’s been the thinking in the past 150 years. I’ll be
talking more about this, but in order to do good research in
evolution, we need to examine where these evolutionary "stories" come
from — what are the assumptions? I’m going to try to
address several of these assumptions and misconceptions by
showcasing some of the scientists who formed the basis of the
classification of microorganisms.
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