On Thu, 28 Oct 2004 16:21:23 -0500, 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.

"RockEaters" are not the only serious challenge to your notion of
quantum-type complementarity of Plant/Animal. Unfortunately for you,
Biology doesn't care that you prefer to think of just two Kingdoms.
The living world has never paid any attention to humankind's many
diverse attempts to classify and sort it out -- it just goes on living
and evolving. However, humans have paid some attention. There are
very good reasons why we have moved from two to five to six Kingdoms
and probably will move upwards from that. There are very good reasons
why we have moved to the notion of two Domains, neither of which fits
your Plant/Animal duality. No doubt in the future there will be other
very good reasons to reorganize things around different ideas. But
Plant/Animal duality is extremely unlikely to be the new organizing
principle.