No, I’m not talking about about the Garden of Eden or heaven, scientists have found a four flagella eukaryote that doesn’t fit with the five known eukaryote kingdoms (plant, animal, fungus, alga, and protist) in a Norwegian lake. These solitary algae eaters have features that fit best with protists and amoebas, but genetically don’t fit with either group, of course they also have double the flagella.

As awesome as identifying a species that split off from all other known genetic lines a full billion years ago is, I’m more interested in some of the language used in MSNBC’s article. Sure, it’s written for a much more general population than even Scientific American and Popular Science, but I’ve seen the “tree of life” plenty of times and it’s useful as a metaphor to describe the branching of different genetic lines (although a spreading and branching vine would be more accurate), but it carries with it some serious religious baggage. I kind of like it since it’s a nice jab at the Genesis creation myth, but due to some of the baggage it also rubs me the wrong way.

There’s also a quote in this article from Kamran Shalchian-Tabrizi, one of the University of Oslo researches that studied this creature, saying,

The microorganism is among the oldest currently living eukaryote organisms we know of. It evolved around one billion years ago, plus or minus a few hundred million years. It gives us a better understanding of what early life on Earth looked like.

I have to give him some some slack since English is not his first language and there’s always the chance that he was misquoted, but it is not “among the oldest currently living eukaryote organisms we know of” those are plants (many of them trees) that are thousands of years old, single celled organisms don’t live very long. We also have no idea how long that current species has been around, but since they don’t fossilize well we don’t know how many iterations it’s evolved through to get to it’s current form from it’s last common ancestor with a known species.

There’s another inane line, this time from the article author, Jennifer Welsh, saying,

Because it has features of two separate kingdoms of life, the researchers think that the ancestors of this group might be the organisms that gave rise to these other kingdoms, the amoeba and the protist, as well. If that’s true, they would be some of the oldest eukaryotes, giving rise to all other eukaryotes, including humans.

No shit. Their ancestors would be the oldest eukaryotes who in turn would have given rise to all other eukaryotes, just like some of our ancestors would include the same exact eukaryotes who gave rise to this new eukaryote kingdom.

An awesome story about a really cool microbe has been ruined by shoddy science reporting. I hate it when that happens.