Talk:3046: Stromatolites
Yay, another Beret Guy appearance! 42.book.addictTalk to me! 03:46, 4 February 2025 (UTC)
- He's unusually sage this time. ;) --172.71.160.32 22:00, 7 February 2025 (UTC)
I'm not sure if I'm trying to remember Bloom County and the penguin (Opus) or Snoopy by Schulz because of the last panel. Shrug. Prolly both. Warm is good. 172.70.175.208 06:08, 4 February 2025 (UTC)
- Add Zonker to this list? 108.162.245.39 17:29, 4 February 2025 (UTC)
- Zonker Harris, yes! 172.70.175.106 18:16, 4 February 2025 (UTC)
How can anybody be related to rock formations? Stomatolites are not organisms, they are the product of organisms. 141.101.105.88 08:12, 4 February 2025 (UTC)
- This might be one of Randall's weaker offerings in terms of scientific accuracy. I think that "stromatolites" as here used refers to the cyanobacterial component of stromatolites, which is the component detected in ancient fossils and is the one responsible for oxygen-evolving photosynthesis (responsible for what was perhaps the first global environmental catastrophe - an element of ancestry of which it might be wise not to boast). Modern stromatolites have both cyanobacteria (ancestors of plastids) and alpha-proteobacteria (ancestors of mitochondria) in their microbial mats, and it's reasonable to assume that alpha-proteobacteria were present in the fossils. So the "cousins" would be of cyanobacteria in the stromatolites, not the stromatolites themselves (in which both were, presumably, cohabiting). Beret Guy also appears to be confused about the proposed sequence of events leading to the origins of mitochondria and eukaryotic cell nuclei. 108.162.245.39 17:29, 4 February 2025 (UTC)
- I've seen the surviving microbial mats in Australia referred to as "stromatolites" as well.Nitpicking (talk) 12:39, 4 February 2025 (UTC)
I wonder if he is related to any specific dinosaurs or whether he bypassed that branch of the tree completely. 09:48, 4 February 2025 (UTC)
I think there's a joke (or at least a reference) here about the relatedness of life. All currently-known organisms are related by descent from a common ancestor, which in English makes us all cousins, of various distances. Mitochondria in plants and animals, for instance, must descend from the same bacterium-like organism that became an endosymbiont in a proto-eukaryote.Nitpicking (talk) 12:39, 4 February 2025 (UTC)
- Since mitochondria and chloroplasts were both originally distinct organisms that were absorbed into the host cells, that makes most modern life descendants of cannibals. Barmar (talk) 15:37, 4 February 2025 (UTC)
- By that logic, eating pretty much any food except salt (and maybe dairy?) is cannibalism. 172.68.70.87 16:09, 4 February 2025 (UTC)
I immediately thought of Fabulous Pedigree, which does include ancestry (and side-branches) going back to (and past) mitochondria, though from a quick check it doesn't seem to specifically include stromatolites. Obviously the listing has lots of (mostly implied) gaps. --162.158.217.72 13:55, 4 February 2025 (UTC)
Beret Guy is emulating Pooh-Bah in The Mikado: "I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule."172.69.33.190 19:07, 4 February 2025 (UTC)NickM
I've added a bit about the length of time it would need to take to click that far back in the past. I'm sure I have got the amount out by several orders of magnitude, so I would appreciate it if anyone fancies a go at estimating how long Beret Guy would have taken. 172.71.241.27 10:49, 4 February 2025 (UTC)
- 2608: Family Reunion estimates about 50 billion generations to the MRCA with plants; this would have taken about a century at a speed of 15 clicks per second. Bacteria reproduce extremely fast - or at least modern ones do - which could easily add a few trillion generations (and a few thousand years of clicking) on the bacterial side of the ancestry. In other words, "thousands of years" is likely an overestimate but not that much of one. (Obviously the time becomes very feasible if Beret Guy used a site that summarized the ancestry.) --162.158.111.134 20:25, 4 February 2025 (UTC)
- Typically the way it works is you work back so far and then find a connection to a pre-existing tree, so he wouldn't need to go very far back to get to a tree that covered all modern humans, provided someone had already done the work beyond that point before him.172.70.91.29 10:27, 5 February 2025 (UTC)
- ...this would have required someone else to have (give or take a small proportion of BG's generations, due to mismatches) done the same work as BG and then the work that we're now excusing BG as having not done. Hard to know how that would happen
- Theoretically, if the website/database was live at the point of the point of Most Recent Common Human Ancestor, that individual could establish the 'further back' (ready for BG's search to find them and latch on to it), or at least as far back as a prior MRCA that also had the website hand to pre-establish yet further back (for as many further iterations as necessary), which might even be tied in with how sufficiently(?) detailed core family tree data. But then BG's Special Powers is reliant upon finding a website that actually predates the web ('90s) and the internet ('70s), and networked databases ('60s), and programmable computers ('40s), and keyboards (let's say the 1700s), and mice (the paleocene, who would have probably prefered using gopher), that was somehow still interacted with in order to set things up ready for BG's own (more trivial) direct miracles. 172.70.163.167 13:10, 5 February 2025 (UTC)
- It would have required someone else to create it, but not necessarily by repeated clicking - they could have used some automated process to do it that would speed things up substantially. Of course, there is then a problem of where the data comes from to feed that process, but once you start worrying about that you've got a more fundamental issue than how quickly he (or anyone else) can click things.141.101.98.187 17:05, 5 February 2025 (UTC)
- Typically the way it works is you work back so far and then find a connection to a pre-existing tree, so he wouldn't need to go very far back to get to a tree that covered all modern humans, provided someone had already done the work beyond that point before him.172.70.91.29 10:27, 5 February 2025 (UTC)
Six paragraphs should be four. Too much non-explanatory and otherwise pointless digression. I'm sure the people who write it don't realize how much it turns off people coming here to read an explanation. 172.70.215.72 11:03, 5 February 2025 (UTC)
- Which two paragraphs? And we already have long paragraphs, but if we joined two pairs together then you'd be happy? Counting just paragraphs is not a good measure, whatever you really mean. And I guarantee that most of what you'd want to remove is only subjectively unnecessary.
- Personally, I'd like the existing six to be tightened up (somehow, yet to go through them to work out how), but each has good points in. Could you be happier with just less loquacious verbosity, but presenting the same general scope in less space? (Probably not, but depends exactly which elements are "pointless digression" in your POV...) 172.70.163.167 13:10, 5 February 2025 (UTC)
- Tolkien wrote this about critique of his Lord of the Rings: "... for I find from the letters that I have received that the passages or chapters that are to some a blemish are all by others specially approved." In the absence of a polling system, how are folk to assess the significance of individual comments? One could do a Musk run through the text, roiling the explain-xkcd community and thereby creating a disturbance in the Force, without actually improving the read. The uncharacteristically poor handling of the science underlying the comic complicates efforts to achieve conciseness and clarity. 172.71.146.32 14:07, 5 February 2025 (UTC)
Parody? (with an evolutionary theory). Several news sites (tabloids?) occasionally write news about people being extremely distantly related to (e. g. 17th-order cousins and above) each other. This comic takes it to the extreme case of being related to the bacteria that created stromatolites. The evolutionary theory shown in the comic is that every organism (Bacteria and Archaea s. l.) is related. 172.70.35.190 07:07, 6 February 2025 (UTC)
- As already covered by a prior comic, we have (nth-)cousins all over the place. A lot of store was set by Obama being 10th cousins with Bush Jr, but also 15th cousin to Churchill and 9th cousin to Brad Pitt (with Hillary Clinton being 9th cousin to Angelina Jolie).
- But cousins is fairly 'easy' (so long as the records, or reasonable presumptions, exist), as there steadily become so many potential common ancestors by various different branches that you might easily find a fathers'-sides co-ancestry point just by having surname clues (to bridge any actual gaps in the paperwork) where a more direct mothers'-sides relationship might be lost. (That's the official, ancestry, of course... Blood descent could well depart significantly from that, whether or not anyone (who 'matters') thinks/'knows' differently at the time.)
- By the same measure, you have also found the (possibly!) most recent common ancestor... You know there must be one, of course, but placing them is subject to all the issues of lack of records (or misdirecting ones) giving you problems. But Beret Guy seems to think his efforts are accurate. And, knowing his expectation-based powers, he probably has. No real parody of evolution, just simplifying away the necessarily messy parts of its long-term study. 172.70.91.11 14:40, 6 February 2025 (UTC)
Did anyone else besides me read "Stromatolites" like a Greek name, like Socrates? Mathmannix (talk) 02:01, 13 February 2025 (UTC)
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