I'm always surprised at how much these articles play up the surprise factor of analyses like these. Are the results actually surprising to anyone in the field? It's a cool visualization and this represents an improvement over our older dataset. But not a shocking revelation.<p>It's fine to play up the conventional wisdom angle, but I don't like the pretense that the scientists themselves are surprised that eukaryotes amount to a tiny fraction of the diversity of life on earth.
I had to really search on Wikipedia to understand this.<p>In case anyone else was just as confused as I was, have a read of:<p>1. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy_(biology)#Kingdoms_and_domains" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy_(biology)#Kingdoms_an...</a><p>2. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_(biology)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_(biology)</a><p>3. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_(biology)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_(biology)</a><p>Humans are part of the Eukaryote domain [a], in the Animalia kingdom. [b]<p>In terms of taxonomy, we are Verterbrates [c] of the Synapsid clade (branch) [d] of Chordates. [e] Within this we are mammalian [f] haplorhini [g] primates [h]. Within the primate order we are of the homonid family [i] and are classified as the species <i>homo sapiens</i>. [j]<p>a. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eukaryote" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eukaryote</a><p>b. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal</a><p>c. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertebrate" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertebrate</a><p>d. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synapsid" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synapsid</a><p>e. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chordate" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chordate</a><p>f. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammal" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammal</a><p>g. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplorhini" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplorhini</a><p>h. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primate" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primate</a><p>i. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hominidae" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hominidae</a><p>j <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_sapiens" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_sapiens</a>
It's interesting that the three main domains of life are considered archaea, eukaryotes and bacteria; but looking at the diagram, the bacteria seem to be split into to two major clades that are more separated than even archaea and eukaryotes are.
it's weird how they use the term genomes over and over, but their reconstruction is based on ~12 RNA genes. There doesn't actually seem to be any genomics in this article.