randman
WK, you seem knowledgeable of Woese's idea here. What do you make of it personally? Do you think, despite not observing this theoritical and Lamarckian evolutionary process, that Woese is right, or not?
What about the possibility that the 3 kingdoms just didn't share a common ancestor?
Well perhaps you would care to hear from Carl himself. From his homepage at
http://www.life.uiuc.edu/micro/faculty/faculty_woese.htm
My work over the last 5 years has centered on genomic analysis, with an emphasis on understanding the evolutionary significance of the phenomenon of horizontal gene transfer (HGT). This has involved in particular an in detail analysis of the phylogenies of the aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases and the effect HGT has had upon the distribution of these key enzymes. The ultimate goal is to construct a model (theory) of how the primary cell types (the archaeal, eubacterial, and eukaryotic) have evolved, from some ancestral state in the RNA-world
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