Sun, 17 Nov 2002 18:40:08 GMT P van Rijckevorsel wrote:
(snipped)


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Likely it had something to do with cell walls. Plants were defined as having
cell walls and usually having chloroplasts, while animals only had membranes
and rarely (if ever) had chloroplasts. Fungi don't have chloroplasts but do
have cell walls.
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I'm not suggesting that terms such as animal and plant serve no
purpose, but no matter how we develop those terms they will have
limitations. So your basic point above is true and will always be
true; that is the nature of biology.

bob

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I must fundamentally disagree. Although there may come a day when all plant
and animal species as we now know them have been exterminated and anybody
speaking of them is thought to refer to mythology these are very real things
for now. Both the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom are absolutes and the
basis of biology. Always have been. Likely to continue to be so for the
foreseeable future.

It is only when looking at the edges or at the 'new' kingdoms that fuzziness
sets in. We may well see a new way to divide bacteria (or the opposite). It
is nonsense to say that just because the glass is not completely full it
must be empty ...
PvR

I do not remember the exact date and year in which I started the idea that
animal and plant kingdom of biology where physics compliments of each other.
I clearly remember though how I came to that idea. And my coming to it is
a beautiful path. In the 1990s one day I observed my Trek carbon fibre
bicycle and said to myself-- "gee, someday human ingenuity will create a
human being whose skeleton system is not calcium based but carbon based"

I dutifully went forward to fill out a patent application on a Human Carbon
Fibre Skeleton System. A technique to achieve those ends.

After writing and sending off for the patent, one day I wondered about this
question. There is a huge difference between "very difficult" and "impossible
due to a principle of science". So, was building a human being with a carbon
fiber skeleton system very difficult that will take many milleniums, or was
it impossible?

If impossible would mean that the Plant kingdom which uses carbon as its
skeletal framework and animals which use calcium as its framework are
not interchangeable. Like in Physics, a particle is a particle and a wave is a
wave.

And so in the late 1990s I began to look for more signs of complimentarity
between animals and plants. The classic examples are the gases of O2
for animals and CO2 for plants. Another classic is the fact that plants are
food
for animals but animals are food for plants (fertilizer and waste).

Question: these cell walls of plants are they carbon?

Question: these chloroplasts of plants-- do animals or bacteria have
some inverse or reverse entity?