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> The first occurred about 2.2 billion years ago, when an archaea swallowed a bacterium that became the mitochondria. The second time happened about 1.6 billion
by mysterypie 2y ago
> The first occurred about 2.2 billion years ago, when an archaea swallowed a bacterium that became the mitochondria. The second time happened about 1.6 billion years ago, when cells absorbed cyanobacteria that became chloroplasts.
How was it possible that I could take 3 years of high school biology and not have heard that one lifeform absorbing another lifeform was responsible for these amazing new capabilities? We learned about mitochondria and chloroplasts, but in a very dry way. Primary education could be so much more interesting to kids with context like this.
- stevenwoo 2y agoPossibly you took biology before this was well known? I think they just have that mitochondria theory from the fossil record and DNA matching between current eukaryotic life.
- mr_toad 2y agoThe idea (Symbiogenesis) dates back to the start of last century, and it was a common idea by the seventies. Curricula can move slowly, but I’d expect that it would have been taught in the eighties. Then again it’s evolution, no way around it, so I can imagine some teachers and schools might omit the theory.
- kuhewa 2y agoYou need some pretty advanced genetic and phylogenetic work to put meat on the bones of the theory though and that happened recently
- graemep 2y agoI am not sure from what point of view you are saying that, but I came across an interesting twist to that. Some years ago I read a fascinating book about evolution, mostly explaining things that do not get taught in school. No surprise there is a lot - school level teaching in any subject is usually simplified and incomplete so not entirely accurate compared to what researchers in the field are studying. There was an interesting, and disturbing preface. One of the authors said his colleagues tried to persuade him not to write the book, because explaining to a wide audience that what they were taught in school about evolution was a simplified approximation (essentially obsolete) would encourage creationism. I thought at the time that this was both unethical and likely to backfire. As I said in another recent comment, a creationist I know recently sent me links to arguments for creationism on the Jehovah's Witnesses' website, and they did precisely this. Quote from research to show people what they were told was false. If you are not truthful people will not trust you, if people in a field are not truthful people in the field loses credibility in the eyes for many people. How difficult is it to tell kids that they are being taught a simplified version, and here is a rough outline of the complexities, but it is beyond what can be taught at their level? I see similar things all over the place, with well meaning people pushing bad evidence for things (e.g. climate change). Same problem when people realise an argument is flawed, or a particular theory or model is flawed, they assume all arguments are flawed.
- tyre 2y agoIn that same vein, take a read of: https://jsomers.net/i-should-have-loved-biology/ https://jsomers.net/i-should-have-loved-biology/
- paulgb 2y agoThis is great, thanks for sharing it! I think it would be good fodder for HN discussion so submitted it to /new, hope you don’t mind.
- aspenmayer 2y agoThanks for that. Here’s a link for those following along: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40103590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40103590
- IAmNotACellist 2y agoI'm not sure either. Public school's primary purpose is to teach you just a few things: 1. The mitochondria (the powerhouse of the cell) 2. You're made up of DNA and everything is atoms with electrons that zip around on little orbital paths 3. Stalactites vs. stalagmites 4. Crocodiles vs. alligators 5. The Holocaust was seriously bad 6. World history consisted of the US revolutionary war, the Civil war (fought over ending slavery), the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Western Front in WWII (which began in 1941 and ended in 1945) You were probably looking out the window for a few years when they continually announced that the mitochondria (POTC) was an absorbed bacterium.
- beacon294 2y agoExperiences vary. I learned the entire European enlightenment, french, college Calculus, Marching band, percussion, College chemistry, college English. In fact, once I got to college I took only chemistry courses (my degree), 1 calculus course, 2 years of German, and 3 philosophy courses. The german was bullshit requirement, frankly, and I should have taken french to simplify my life. But I was young and naive.
- b112 2y agoIf you took french, all you'd have learned is a different way to pronounce a lot of english words. By taking german, you learned how to take little things, and turn them into lengthy monstrosities.
- anal_reactor 2y agoWhen you have 25 overstimulated kids and 45 minutes and an underpaid teacher, it's just impossible to make it interesting.
- huytersd 2y agoI mean there are so many amazing things like ATP generating machinery, how flagella move, ribosomal walking etc. You don’t have to post a cheap, lazy, cynical comment like this, there’s a lot to learn and only so much time to do it in.
- stoperaticless 2y agoClearly you are curious about this stuff, so it would be easy to teach you about it. Not everybody is so eager to learn biology. My bystander’s understanding: curiousity is the key factor distinguishing between “good” and “bad” students (as measured by grades)
- throwup238 2y ago> You don’t have to post a cheap, lazy, cynical comment like this, there’s a lot of learn and only so much time to do it in. It helps to keep in mind that you're replying to a user who voluntarily named themselves anal_reactor
- TaylorAlexander 2y agoActually it’s possible (idk if he was underpaid) though I had a science teacher who is an extremely rare person. This is his website. http://boomeria.com/ http://boomeria.com/
- VS1999 2y agoThe teachers make more than I did for most of my life. Is it not possible for them to take personal responsibility without having to provide excuses? Most teachers do not want to be teachers and are just there because they couldn't make it in their own field or just prefer to do less skilled work.
- matheusmoreira 2y agoWhen bacteria die, their brethren will literally absorb the DNA of the fallen and obtain their abilities. Bacteria are the Mega Men of microbiology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformation_(genetics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformation_(genetics) Oh you evolved a new antibiotic resistance mechanism? Now I've got your power.
- keiferski 2y agoI’ve had the same experience. Biology in school was boring and static, whereas today I can get lost reading about obscure biological phenomena on Wikipedia.
- throwaway64643 2y agoYou can hardly blame the school for that though. As others have said, it's not possible to cater to every student's interest and ability, so compromise has to be made and consequently things turn uninteresting. Also, there's some confirmation bias and survival bias here. You won't read something that's boring and static to you, or you don't bother remembering reading/watching them. Whereas if something wakes your interest, you'll likely to explore further. At school, you were forced to learn things regardless of whether you might or might not like. Also, 'you' of today is not the same 'you' back at school. You're now much more experienced and knowledgeable than before. So reading, understanding things are easier than at 15. It's like learning a new language, at first it is challenging because you know only a handful of words, but as you learn more, it gets easier. You know where things are in the big picture and they become interesting.
- keiferski 2y agoMy point was more that these obscure bizarre biological phenomena are never covered in high school biology classes.
- travisgriggs 2y agoIt wasn’t on the AP test. (Put it there and you would have learned about it, because tests define curriculum—either immediately or downstream)
- jrpt 2y agoIt was probably mentioned in the textbook and you just forgot. I just checked my textbook and it’s one of the first things they say when introducing mitochondria and chloroplasts.
- SllX 2y agoI remember we learned this about mitochondria and chloroplasts in 10th Grade Biology back in my day, but I think if I quizzed anybody I went to high school with today it would be a coin flip as to whether they remembered that as part of the lesson. I mean, it's probably a coin flip on any piece of information from when we learned about organelles, or if they even remember the word "organelle". If you quizzed me, I couldn't have told you approximately when these events happened without the article in front of me even though I'm pretty sure we covered that too. 100% of my former schoolmates would probably remember the "powerhouse of the cell" meme though.
- qwerty456127 2y agoI believe the word "organelle" is a part of passive vocabulary of many reasonably educated people. Non-biologists would probably fail to quickly come up with a single word to mean any specialized part of a biological cell but would probably understand when they meet this word used by someone else.
- SllX 2y agoMaybe? I’ve thought the same about a lot of things covered in the school’s curriculum with former schoolmates or people who went to the same schools in the same district around the same time with the same curriculum; but over the course of my adult life I’ve heard variations of the question “why didn’t we cover this?” about some piece of information (including specific vocabulary) about some subject or another that was covered and I clearly remember being in the textbooks that were used district-wide. Among friends at least I’ve long ago stopped answering that question with “actually, we did”. People just forget a lot of what they learned in school, but if you re-teach them it might jog their memory of the first time they learned it… or it might not. Pretty much a coin toss.
- qwerty456127 2y agoQuite obviously, almost nothing will stick if simply mentioned/explained just once or twice during the schooling process. Its usage has to be incorporated into the process kind of like when you learn basic algebraic formulae and then apply them countless times during the years to come so they become a thing as ordinary as your own hands. You can still forget precise correct formulae after some years of non-usage but you will never forget they exist and you will always know you have to look up or derive a specific formula once you encounter a relevant problem.
- Affric 2y agoWhen did you finish school?
- kovacs_x 2y agotrust me- there are lot of things that are barely mentioned in high school, also curriculum is not updated as often as the science uncovers something new and biology is moving forward with a break neck speed at the moment, imo. Like, you couldn't learn about CRISPR editing before 2000.. because it was not there then. Now it's common knowledge.
- kuhewa 2y agoDepends when you took it. The endosymbiotic origin theory has links being worked out well into the 2000s. https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-origin-of-mitochondria-14232356/ https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-origin-of-mito...
- dredmorbius 2y agoSymbiogenesis of mitochondria substantially pre-dates the 2000s. It was first proposed over a century ago, 1905 and 1910 by Russian botanist Konstantin Mereschkowski, and substantiated with evidence by Lynn Margulis (a very substantial evolutionary biologist, also one of Carl Sagan's wives) in 1967. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiogenesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbiogenesis> Mitochondria were sufficiently established in general awareness to be a plot point of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, being a concept which fascinated the character of Charles Wallace Murray, a young prodigy, in the stories. Though I don't recall if symbiogenesis is specifically referenced. The first story in the series was published in 1962.
- heyoni 2y agoSure but when it was taught in the 2000’s, it was always done with a big caveat about how the theory was still being debated. In hindsight, all previous mentions will seem like substantiated and obvious statements but there’s a reason articles about it are still coming out today.
- dredmorbius 2y agoI'm not an area expert, and of course don't know what you were taught, or even what general pedagogy over recent decades has been. I suspect that strong confirmatory evidence came through awareness and analysis of mitochondrial DNA, a term which begins apppearing in Google Ngrams as of the 1960s. Full DNA analysis likely wouldn't have occurred until the 1990s or early aughts, when full genome sequencing became available, so the point might have been argued until then. It strikes me as a rather rear-guard objection at that point however. (I'd tried a few times to make a clearer assessment of when the view became mainstream, with inconclusive results, though "proposed in the early 20th century, largely substantiated in the 1960s, and all but sealed by 2000" seems a fair statement.)
- ilkke 2y ago2.2 billion years ago, and then again 1.6 billion years ago = once in a billion years event?
- nextaccountic 2y agoDid you learn in school that mitochondria had its own DNA? And that our mitochondria comes from the egg, so mitochondrial DNA always comes from our mother's mitochondria. Or even played Parasite Eve [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasite_Eve_(video_game)#Plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasite_Eve_(video_game)#Plot
- mysterypie 2y agoActually, yes. I recall that the high school textbook and lecture did talk about mitochondria having its own DNA and that mitochondria traced the maternal tree. Although those are somewhat interesting, its origin as a separate lifeform is WAY more interesting.
- j_bum 2y agoIf this is exciting to you, I’d recommend “Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life” by Nick Lane [0]. It’s a fascinating and captivating (albeit dense) exploration into the concept that mitochondria were central to the success of eukaryotic life. I read it in a book club during my PhD. [0] https://nick-lane.net/books/power-sex-suicide-mitochondria-meaning-life/ https://nick-lane.net/books/power-sex-suicide-mitochondria-m...