Post 11: Brief examples of how we never agree on anything 😅

Wherever you see a field of biology that seems well-studied and with clear topics, it’s actually not the case.

¯_(ツ)_/¯

• In microbial ecology, there’s an ongoing battle over how and when to define species, what a strain is, how to measure community diversity, how to assess metabolism, etc.
• In evolution, there are 1001 different evolutionary models, and every time you make a phylogeny, someone won’t like it because you didn’t choose THE model they would have used.
• In protein science, it seems like we all know what we mean when we talk about folds and domains, but in reality, it’s not clear when something is one or the other, which is why everyone has their own definition and structural similarity metric.
• In virology, there are those who say viruses are a form of life, and those who say nope, as well as the debate over the possibility of creating a virus taxonomy.

And so, every field has its controversies and apparent definitions, which aren’t really definitions at all—they’re just the ones that have been the most successful in the public eye, until another scheme comes.