Socrtwo

Hi. I have an a BA in Biology from Swarthmore College and an MA in the same field from the University of Pennsylvania. I've contributed extensively to article in Wikipedia about the various plant hormones and contributed to articles about office suite and office suite components software. My E-mail address is socrtwo@s2services.com.--Socrtwo 17:07, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

Hi this is an update. I'm working on a project to put the entire catalog of life (see http://www.sp2000.org/) into a gedcom format, which is the family tree interchange format developed by the Mormons. The Web site where these gedcom files will be displayed and can be commented on is here: http://www.genealogyoflife.com.

The idea of this site is that all the uniquely named levels of a family tree hierarchy were originally a unique individual organism or species. Lower organizational structures represent daughter species that originated from the upper level original species. That is the kingdoms, phylums, classes, orders, families, genuses, and species all were unique species originally and then they differentiated into all the named types below them. This may be more of a device than an actuality because the species may still exist so it would be categorized as a species and it's genus, family, order may be duplicates.

A second idea is that much of speciation does not occur because of the accumualtion of mutations resulting in a new species. Instead it claims most speciation occurs by hybridization. So a new species would have two parent species. The more distant two organisms are, the less likely they are to hybridize. Also the more distantly related two organisms are the less likely hybridizations will produce fertile offspring. However the more distantly related organisms are, the more likely a successful hybridization will produce a radically new kind of organism or the more likely it will produce a new high level branch of the tree of life, like a kingdom, phylum, class, or order.

An example of this might be Tunicates of Sea Squirts. They are the presumed ancestors of all vertebrates, yet they make cellulose. They are potentially a cross between plants and filtering marine animals like sponges.

I would also say that this site will espouse the belief in catastrophism as one of the important mechanisms behind speciation. The idea here is a little different than the conventional biology view of how catastrophism works. Instead of just opening new niches, this site will explain that speciation is produced at least in part at these times of catastrophe, becuase the habitable range of the earth becomes much narrower and niches overlap greatly. Additionally because of widespread environmental destruction organism have a difficult time finding organisms of their own species with which to mate. Finally during these period of destruction there are widespread viral infections and loss of protecting ozone so chromosome numbers are duplicaterd occasionally. This duplication has been shown to produce fertility in plant crosses at least, if not in animals.--Socrtwo 18:46, 31 July 2008 (UTC)