[Taxacom] Eubacteria and Archaebacteria

[Kenneth Kinman]

Hi Dick,   
      Well, remember that they were originally named Urkingdom
Archaebacteria, and the name itself reflects the belief that they were
"archaic".  Then after Gogarten and others showed that this was not the
case, Woese et al. renamed it Domain Archaea.  Ernst Mayr criticized
Woese for doing this (retaining the uninformative "Archae" and
discarding the informative ending "-bacteria").     
       It's really a shame that the name Metabacteria (an informative
name proposed over 20 years ago) wasn't adopted, and the uninformative
name "Archaea" was adopted instead.  The opportunity to set things
straight was not taken, and the confusion and misinformation thus
continue to this day.  I still advocate refering to them as Metabacteria
(a.k.a. Archaebacteria).   Anyway, if you want to read more about it,
see Ernst Mayr's article in PNAS (Two Empires or Three):

http://www.pnas.org/content/95/17/9720.full

--------------------------------------------------------
Dick Jensen wrote:  
     I must have missed something along the way.  Virtually every text
I am familiar with depicts the phylogeny of life as
(Eubacteria(Archaea,Eukarya)).  How could anyone interpret this as an
indicator that Archaea are the most primitive?
Dick J