New order of animals discovered? | Hacker News Reader

New order of animals discovered?

scientificamerican.com

142 pointsMaysonL28 comments

From the submitted blog post: "It was only recently that it was discovered that mice sing to each other. It was not so very long ago that it was discovered that clouds are filled with bacteria. What else remains to be known? Nearly everything."

That's the take-away idea, that there are still unexpected discoveries to be made all around us. The excitement with that idea seems to carry into the author's writing in the blog post.

David Baltimore won a Nobel Prize for discovering reverse transcriptase, the enzyme that allows HIV to work. In a talk he gave at my high school, he stressed the same message, saying that "the frontier of knowledge is nearer than we expect".

Growing up, we learn everything throuugh books which seem to present all that is knowable about a subject. It's hard to unlearn that perspective and appreciate how much there is that humanity doesn't know.

>That's the take-away idea, that there are still unexpected discoveries to be made all around us.

Especially now, that we are able to store all the knowledge in a way that it is easily accessible and searchable. How much old "knowledge" is there, lost on paper in archives?

According to Wikipedia:

"Mantophasmatodea is a suborder of carnivorous African insects discovered in 2002, originally considered to be a new order, but since relegated to subordinal status, and comprising the single family Mantophasmatidae."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantophasmatidae

Am I just sensitive today, or was that a really poorly written article?

Not just poor grammar, but silly spelling errors too:

What was more, time and analyzes would prove...

I think it's not about poor spelling or grammar but how to structure an article. A well structured article can be easy and fun to digest even with syntax mistakes.

Any one of the three are O.K. on their own; it's when you mix two or more together that things start to get bumpy- IMHO.

Actually I thought it was exceptionally well-written for a blog post since it totally held my interest throughout. Don't confuse poor writing with good writing that just needs a little love from an editor.

That was the drama the author threw in. It was cheap.

It's not that bad if you don't mind that he's storytelling rather than just reporting news and facts. Usually it drives me crazy when web writers do this, but in this case it wasn't too bad, although I still didn't bother to read the whole thing.

A good news article, especially on the web, should answer as many big questions as possible within the first couple of paragraphs. Typically readers don't appreciate being kept in the dark. If your heading is "man discovers new life-form" we should have a description of it within 30 seconds of reading. The name of the new order shouldn't be in the 8th paragraph.

I agree. It was unnecessarily sensationalist and ultimately invalidates its own title. Going from "common insect recognized as belonging to new order" to "discovery of a new life-form" is quite a leap. The author also seems to conflate knowledge (or at least awareness) with formal labeling. Plenty of people had known and even collected these insects for years, but hadn't gotten around to naming and categorizing them yet.

Agreed. I stopped reading halfway through, having not yet found a description of the beast beyond "It was a fossil that looked like a cross between two different kinds of animals," which describes everything from jackalopes to owlbears. The author doesn't even note that it was an insect until 3/4 of the way through the article.

OK, so what makes it so different? That's all I was looking for.

Me too. And I wanted to know why it was different than a praying mantis specifically.

I agree, but the answer to your question is that it has no wings.

well, nice article, it's funny to see this listed as a discovery, I'm african and have seen this insect before and probably many others in my country, and I am also sure many local folks know about this insects, too bad, they don't know it's a great discovery for science.

great comment :)

((and shows how western euro/american/.. science in not end all, know all thing))

The discovery, as the article pointed out, was that this Was something un-catalogued and in fact an entire new branch of life that was not recognized. Not that the bug was unknown, but unrecognized for what it was.

Having seen it and not recognized it as a new order of life, is the tragedy. Because, honestly, we are almost all ignorant of biology beyond human biology.

The entire premise of the article, and much of modern science, is that something is not a true discovery until a white european or american observes it. There are countless examples of this principle.

OT: I usually dislike if something pops up when I hover over a word. The implementation on this site is different though. Select a word and hover "learn more" for a while, or click it. I still don't know how I feel about that but the ease of use to get to a Wikipedia article, images or videos is nice.

Things you never notice if you read on an ipad...

Isn't there a "scientific Google Goggles version"?

Wouldn't it be as easy as photograph all archived specimens and let Google's photo search filter out duplicates of known animals. What remains needs names...

Interesting article. It's strange that over the last 100,000 years no one in Namibia or other parts of Africa had discovered any of these insects.

Or had they.

This reminds me of something I noticed about economics and the Nobel Prize. Every other year or so, when the Nobel for economics is awarded, very often I notice it's awarded for something that I already knew or considered obvious, or figured out independently. Yes, yes, I know the differentiator is that the person in question wrote academic papers about it, had influence within the field with formal citations, and often "proved" it (or explained it, formally, as much as one can in a soft science like economics), but it wasn't a fundamentally world-shaking or new breakthrough. Unlike say most of the physics prizes. When I first heard about the theory of relativity I wasn't like, "Duh, obvious!", or quantum mechanics, etc. But that has happened a lot with economics.

Anyway this article made me think of it, because it started from the position that someone had discovered something totally new and unknown to mankind, only later to reveal that actually lots of people knew about it, they just didn't have an official academic name & categorization for it, formally, within the academic field in question. But it wasn't truly new. And strains the common meaning of what should be a powerful term: breakthrough.

Fokken' Prawns.

Was that a reference to the movie, "District 9"? I don't see much resemblance beyond the "unknown insectoid life" theme...

You know how it is, if South Africa is mentioned, someone brings it up.

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