"A lot of organisms are going to benefit," he says.
"It's hard to survive in a reef, so a lot of organisms have had to develop really nasty venoms and poisons [to stave off predators] that are especially potent in chemical form and end up being the source of a lot of drugs".
Subsequent studies showed that Bidder wasn't quite right; there are lots of marine organisms, for example, that never stop growing but age anyway.
The basis of cladistics are lots and lots of characteristics of organisms – in the case of the fossil vertebrates these tend to be anatomical features of the bones and teeth, but for living species can include soft tissues, genetics, behaviour and other lines of evidence.
With the advent of new and cheaper sequencing technologies and ongoing sequencing projects such as GEBA [ 1], which aims to close the gaps in the bacterial tree of life, a lot of bacterial organisms are now being sequenced [ 2].
"People don't think of glaciers as being places of life," she said, "but a lot of other organisms in the area depend on their health".
"There are a lot of freshwater organisms that the birds feed on, and while sea gulls can drink salt water, birds and ducks generally require fresh water for drinking".
Neither of you is a big fan of the way a lot of new organisms are developed.
For example, many texts and the vast majority of news reporters like to repeat the idea that an asteroid crashed into the Earth some 65 million years ago and destroyed the dinosaurs and a lot of other organisms.
"Because there is an advantage to sticking together under these circumstances, and because we know that lots of single-celled organisms make enzymes to liberate goods from their environment, this may be the evolutionary force that led to multicellularity," Murray said.
