I think that if the taxonomy is based on evolutionary paths, it's somewhat more ... | Hacker News

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kpil on Oct 3, 2015 | parent | context | favorite | on: Study of protein folds adds to evidence that virus...

I think that if the taxonomy is based on evolutionary paths, it's somewhat more "real" compared to the "looks alike" sense. The evolutionary paths could potentially give some insights, while grouping similar but genetically unrelated species is just a confusion in that sense.

On the other hand - classifying things based on their genome does not really help us understand the biomes.

danieltillett on Oct 3, 2015 [–]

I was of course stretching things a bit to make the point that taxonomy is a human classification system that life ignores :)

This is particularly the case with microbes where because of rampant horizontal gene transfer we don’t have clean evolutionary paths.

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