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Record W2083340389 · doi:10.1101/cshperspect.a015974

How Natural a Kind Is "Eukaryote?"

2014· article· en· W2083340389 on OpenAlexaffabout
W. Ford Doolittle

Bibliographic record

VenueCold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology · 2014
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
TopicProtist diversity and phylogeny
Canadian institutionsDalhousie University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsBiologyNova scotiaEukaryoteLibrary scienceComputational biologyEvolutionary biologyZoologyBiochemistryArchaeologyGenomeComputer scienceGene

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Systematics balances uneasily between realism and nominalism, uncommitted as to whether biological taxa are discoveries or inventions. If the former, they might be taken as natural kinds. I briefly review some philosophers' concepts of natural kinds and then argue that several of these apply well enough to "eukaryote." Although there are some sticky issues around genomic chimerism and when eukaryotes first appeared, if we allow for degrees in the naturalness of kinds, existing eukaryotes rank highly, higher than prokaryotes. Most biologists feel this intuitively: All I attempt to do here is provide some conceptual justification.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.005
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.005
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.007
Threshold uncertainty score0.028

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0050.005
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0040.039
Scholarly communication0.0070.012
Open science0.0010.002
Research integrity0.0020.004
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.009
GPT teacher head0.239
Teacher spread0.230 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations4
Published2014
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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