Archimedes Plutonium wrote:

And I am also troubled by how to fit the rock-eating microbes into a
PlantKingdom dual to an AnimalKingdom.

This is a challenge because the Plant kingdom is one that lives off the Sun
energy whereas RockEaters live off the chemical energy of rocks and do not
need the Sun.

I prefer to think that Biology is just 2 Kingdoms where one is the dual
compliment of the other and I prefer these two to be just the PlantKingdom
and AnimalKingdom and to fit every species in one or the other.

So RockEaters pose a huge challenge.

Only if you insist on clinging on to a frankly very silly theory.

Bacteria do not pose a challenge because they are easily classified as
photosynthethic or living off of other biological units as animals, unless
the bacteria are rockeaters.

Viruses do not pose a challenge because they are thought of as transposons
or mobile genes and belong to the same genome which they parasitize.

I suppose the answer to my problem would be to find some way of finding out
which came first on Earth, the Rockeaters or Photosynthetic plants. Which
preceded the other?

If you think of life as a consequence of the presence of energy being
present along with the correct conditions for life, then the supposed
duality disappears. Life simply uses energy; doesn't matter how it gets it.

Has anyone researched RockEaters to see if they could be compounded to form
a blue-green algae?

Photosynthesis works by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. An
earlier photosynthesis mechanism split hydrogen sulphide into hydrogen
and sulphur; this effectively was both one of your "rockeaters" and
"photosynthetic" bacteria.

I shall be interested to hear how you resolve this unity into a dichotomy.

--
Dr Dan Holdsworth
Remedy ARS Administrator, Manchester Computing