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I was thinking that if no agreement can be made and the number of species keeps rising, the prokaryotes would get split into one or a few species and the curren
by nonbel 11y ago
I was thinking that if no agreement can be made and the number of species keeps rising, the prokaryotes would get split into one or a few species and the current species would become sub-species (or some other appropriate label). This would be similar to how astronomers kept finding objects like pluto they didn't want to call planets.
By the way, my spell check doesn't even recognize the word prokaryote (although it does have eukaryote).
- dalke 11y agoThe prokaryotes are already split into two domains, so there's no way they will be called subspecies of a single species. Note that all the millions of eukaryotes fit into one domain. The domain is a much higher level than species. It's Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_taxonomy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacterial_taxonomy . Thus, it's hugely more likely that the intermediate classification terms will be used, rather than group everything a subspecies of a small number of species. Even if there are billions of prokaryotic species.