Summer Mirth

by Elio
 

From a presentation at a 'Comparative Mi­cro­bial Genomics Workshop', attri­but­ed to W.P. Hanage. Source

A guy walks at night on a beach in California and stubs his toe against an old bottle, which breaks and releases a genie. "I’ll grant you one wish, oh Master," says the genie.
 

The man replies, "Well, I'd dearly love to go to Hawaii but I hate both airplanes and ships, so would you build me a highway from here to there?" The genie thinks for a moment, then replies, "Indeed, I said you could have one wish, but this one seems nearly impossible. Could you ask for something easier?"
 

The man, being a microbiological sort, says, "OK, can you then tell me what is a species?"
 

The genie pauses, then answers, “Do you want it two lanes or four?”
 

For greater enlightenment, click here or here.
 

 
 

 
 

Comments

[Stanley Maloy]

Maybe the problem is simply a "numbers game". For example, based upon numbers from web sources, there are about 5 x 10^8 dogs and 6.4 x 10^7 house cats on earth. Even if the actual number of organisms within the genus Canis or Felis was off by 10-100x, this is so much lower than the number of bacteria on earth that the potential for kinky experiments which would confuse the species definition are much, much more limited.