How a guy from Montana overturned 150 years of biology (opens in new tab)

The HN title is consistent with the Atlantic title, but the Atlantic title is clickbait.

He didn't overturn 150 years of biology. He found that one little corner of the vastness which is biology was somewhat wrong -- lichen are symbiosis of two fungi and an algae, instead of just one fungus and an algae. Good for him, and he has an interesting backstory, but sheesh.

My favorite part of this story is how incredibly strong biases are toward existing hypotheses.

"Lichenologists all thought that the fungi in the partnership belonged to a group called the ascomycetes—so Spribille had only searched for ascomycete genes. Almost on a whim, he broadened his search to the entire fungal kingdom, and found something bizarre."

Sometimes we need to just throw our hypotheses out the window and look at all the data our tools can give us, especially now that sequencing is so cheap.

I think Montana should be capitalized, no? Proper noun, right? Possibly Biology too, but I'm an engineer so English not my strong suit..

The thread from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12143199

TLDR: lichens are not a symbiosis between a fungus and an alga; they are a symbioses between two fungi and an alga.

It's a very nice article that explains how this was discovered. If you like biology, read the article; you'll like it.

Hate the writing of the article. Hallmark of a lazy writer is one that starts with "if you had told <insert name> ... would have laughed". Probably grew up in one of the Hutterite communities in Montana (since he spoke a form of German).

Other than that, nice discovery.