Laughing Coyote
Member
What is the basis for this assertion? How do you define "kingdom" in your usage here? Why do you say minerals are a kingdom of life?
I'll point out that evolutionary biologists now accept existence of 6 different kingdoms "Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista, Archaea/Archaeabacteria, and Bacteria/Eubacteria." So you will have to modify your number of kingdoms to nine altogether, if you want to keep your heavenly kingdoms, and ten if you want to put humans into a different kingdom. Personally I'd make it eleven, because my dog really doesn't fit in the others either, and maybe 12, because my wife says I occupy a whole separate kingdom.
The three kingdoms of multi-cellular organisms identified by biologists have different essential metabolic bases, thereby causing them to play very different roles within the ecosphere.
There are two kingdoms of bacteria, one from the ancient earth which were methane breathers and now only exist in the guts of other organisms, under the earth, or next to volcano vents on the floor of the sea. And the subsequent ones, which evolved to live in a changing atmosphere and biological context. You could say that bacteria are the laboratory of life, as their high rate of reproduction allows mutations with their new possibilities to appear relatively quickly. To give you an idea of how fast they reproduce, if all the offspring a bacteria were allowed to survive and reproduce, they'd within days fill up the entire planet. This is why they keep coming up with ways to resist our antibiotics so quickly, for example.
Bacteria have created at least 56 forms of metabolism, in which energy is captured and used to do different things, of which at least three slipped into other cells to form Animals, Plants and Fungi, in an evolutionary process that biologists have called Symbiogenesis. (The generation of new forms of life through symbiosis.) It is thought that such symbiogenesis is responsible for most if not all the major phyla as well as the six kingdoms.
Bacteria also invented many other things that have been used by multi-cellar life, such as the calcium structures which allowed the creation of bones and teeth, as well as coral in the sea. And so forth.
Plants have organelles called chloroplasts in their cells that once were separate bacteria that convert sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into sugars which provide the building blocks and energy storage for plants, animals, and fungi, at least.
Animals have bacterial cells that became organelles in their cells that metabolize energy from the carbon compounds produced by plants called mitochondria. Fungi break down and metabolize dead organic matter, and they can break down and access minerals. Bacteria created the first nuclear reactors by concentrating radioactive materials to reach critical mass and produce heat. Humans have more bacterial cells in their bodies than human cells, making up approximately 6 pounds of our weight, so you say there is some question whether we are more bacteria than Eukaryota (multicellar life) and in any case without their symbiotic relationships with our cells and organs, you'd soon die without them. Something that is increasingly becoming a problem with the overuse of antibiotics.
All life on earth in fact would quickly die, and the earth's oceans in fact would not exist were it not for bacteria. Early bacteria created an early atmosphere of methane and eventually our current oxygen rich atmosphere on the planet as waste from their metabolism of the initial carbon dioxide atmosphere of the early early planet. They are also the creators of the oxidized forms of minerals and metals that currently characterize the surface of the planet. The oceans would have gradually melted away without the volatile oxygen-rich atmosphere to capture escaping hydrogen molecules and return them in the form of water. This probably is why Mars lost its seas and Venus doesn't have any because they never had sufficient life. Photosynthesizing Bacteria furthermore through their metabolism of carbon dioxide contribute to making a planet hospitable to life. Bacteria were first inhabitants of earth, they created all forms of life on it, and in the end, as the sun expands to eventually consume the planet, bacteria will be the last inhabitants on the planet. Probably already there are bacteria spores riding on our space probes towards other stars, which from their perspective might be the ultimate purpose of a complex form of life such as humans. Some think that is how life might have come to this planet.
(Lynn Margolis, who rediscovered the concept of biosymbiosis in evolution and was a strong critic of the neo-evolutionism of people such as Richard Dawkins that many religious people are also so critical of, has a number of readable and interesting books that discuss this whole evolutionary process from this perspective. I'd say the sense of evolution she has would concur with that of the Christian theologians who follow the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. And now that I think about it, she could very well be a Whiteheadean. I'll add that Darwin himself never contested the existence of God, and even in the last paragraph of his Origin of Species he speaks of God, in a way that also would concur with Whitehead.)
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