The Surprising Archaea: Discovering Another Domain of Life
Oxford University Press: 2000. 214 pp. £19.95, $29.95
Life just keeps on multiplying. When we were very young there were Animals and Plants, which Carolus Linnaeus happily confirmed for us, but which grew into three 'kingdoms' when we had to add on the unicellular things. At school we learned to recognize that unicells came in eukaryotic and prokaryotic versions, those respectively with or without their DNA packaged in a nucleus. A little later, and we had barely learned to love Lynn Margulis' definitive five kingdoms when the molecular lobby started to tell us that the two 'simplest' of these were each in themselves multiples of many kinds of unicellular life-forms. Now the evidence of molecular biologists is forcing us to recognize that not only can life be categorized into five, or even more, kingdoms, but also according to a parallel system of three 'domains' (Eukaryota, Bacteria and Archaea). John Howland's book takes us on a tour of the third domain, the Archaea. Prokaryotic, but not bacterial, they pursue their peculiar lifestyles in the more extreme environments of Earth, as they may have done for perhaps 3.5 billion years.
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