Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 Learning from life on Earth in the present day
- 2 Essentials of fungal cell biology
- 3 First, make a habitat
- 4 The building blocks of life
- 5 An extraterrestrial origin of life?
- 6 Endogenous synthesis of prebiotic organic compounds on the young Earth
- 7 Cooking the recipe for life
- 8 ‘It’s life, Jim . . .’
- 9 Coming alive: what happened and where?
- 10 My name is LUCA
- 11 Towards eukaryotes
- 12 Rise of the fungi
- 13 Emergence of diversity
- References
- Index
2 - Essentials of fungal cell biology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- 1 Learning from life on Earth in the present day
- 2 Essentials of fungal cell biology
- 3 First, make a habitat
- 4 The building blocks of life
- 5 An extraterrestrial origin of life?
- 6 Endogenous synthesis of prebiotic organic compounds on the young Earth
- 7 Cooking the recipe for life
- 8 ‘It’s life, Jim . . .’
- 9 Coming alive: what happened and where?
- 10 My name is LUCA
- 11 Towards eukaryotes
- 12 Rise of the fungi
- 13 Emergence of diversity
- References
- Index
Summary
As I have shown in Chapter 1, with the quotation from Whittaker (1969), by about the middle of the twentieth century the three major kingdoms of eukaryotes were finally recognised, and a crucial character difference was their respective modes of nutrition:
(a) animals engulf
(b) plants photosynthesise
(c) fungi absorb externally digested nutrients.
As you might expect, many other differences can be added to these – some general differences, some highly specific. Some of these kingdom-specific differences are absolute, but most have to be qualified in some way. For example, you might, with some reason, say that a characteristic of animals is that they move, and contrast that with the characteristic immobility of plants. But coral reefs are made up of animals and yet are pretty immobile; and the next time you stroll through a meadow in late summer and the breeze stirs up an atmosphere filled with flying seeds, look around and remind yourself: ‘the plants are migrating’.
Consequently, although it is possible to assemble panels of biological characteristics that are specifically expressed by each kingdom, you have to recognise that those characteristics may be subject to the context in which they are expressed and that in some circumstances there may be serious exceptions. When you try to establish evolutionary relationships there are more difficulties, the prime one being how to decide whether a character is ancestral or adapted. Intuitively, you might expect the ancestral character to be the simpler, and the adapted character to be the more complex.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Fungal Biology in the Origin and Emergence of Life , pp. 19 - 41Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013