In the June 1984 issue of PNAS, James Lake and colleagues (1) published a provocative article in which they proposed that eu-karyotes (animals, fungi, plants, and protists) evolved from a specific group of thermophilic prokaryotes, the "eocyte" archaebacteria (1). Few questions capture the imagination of biologists like the origin of eukaryotic (nucleus-containing) cells such as our own, and as additional support accumulated (e.g., refs. 2-4) Lake's eocyte hypothesis garnered considerable attention. The idea that eukaryotes could have arisen from within an already diversified archaebac-terial lineage was eventually overshadowed by Woese's (5) "three-domains" view of life in which archaebacteria (including eocytes) represent a natural (i.e., monophyletic) group to the exclusion of eukaryotes and eubacteria (5). In this issue of PNAS, Cox et al.
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