Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bacteria had remained undefined when, in 1962, Roger Y. Stanier and C.B. van Niel published their famed paper ''The concept of a bacterium.'' The articulation of the prokaryote-eukaryote dichotomy was a vital moment in the history of biology. This article provides a brief overview of the context in which the prokaryote concept was successfully launched in the 1960s, and what it was meant to connote. Two concepts were initially distinguished within the prokaryote-eukaryote dichotomy at that time. One was organizational and referred to comparative cell structure; the other was phylogenetic and referred to a ''natural'' classification. Here, I examine how the two concepts became inseparable; how the prokaryotes came to signify a monophyletic group that preceded the eukaryotes, and how this view remained unquestioned for 15 years, until the birth of molecular evolutionary biology and coherent methods for bacteria phylogenetics based on 16S rRNA. Today, while microbial phylogeneticists generally agree that the prokaryote is a polyphyletic group, there is no agreement on whether the term should be maintained in an organizational sense.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.038 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".