Metabacteria, "Archaea", Synergistes (UPDATE!!!)

[Ken Kinman]

        ***Quick Update on Global Classification of Life, etc.:
     After publishing the criticism of Woese's "Three Domains" in my
October 1997 article, I found that many biologists greatly dislike the
name "Archaea" and they were delighted to learn that there was another,
more appropriate name all along (namely Metabacteria).  Many biologists
realize that basing a global classification on a single gene was a bad
idea to begin with, and that the Three Domains were little more than a
warmed-over version of the discredited Three Urkingdoms.
      GOOD NEWS!!!!!---In the final note of my paper I criticized the
government's NCBI taxonomy database for classifying Synergistes within
Class Posibacteracea ("Firmicutes"), even a full year after I had named
Family Synergistaceae to indicate its distinctiveness.  I got
correspondence from several bacteriologists who concurred, and the NCBI
has finally removed Synergistes from Family Clostridiaceae (and from
Class Posibacteracea).
      As for getting biologists to use the term Metabacteria, instead of
"Archaea", that is going to take more time, especially if "certain
people" resist it.  And the problems of the other distortions in the
eubacterial tree will no doubt take many, many years to disentangle,
even after biologists stop using Metabacteria as an "outgroup" (it's
actually an ingroup) to the Eubacteria.  The circular reasoning that has
seemingly bolstered Woese's phylogenies (and a supposed thermophilic
origin of life) will eventually be exposed, and microbiology can get on
with repairing the damage that has been done.  The full text of my
articles on these subjects appears on my Internet homepage at:
 www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/5074
                                      Sincerely, Ken Kinman

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