In their recent essay, Poole and Penny defend the view that the ability to engulf bacteria and other food particles— phagocytosis—must have evolved in the eukaryotic lineage as an absolute prerequisite for the origin of mitochondria. That hypothesis, which one could call "phagotrophy first", is now almost 40 years old. By comparison, the scientific practice of evaluating hypotheses by the measure of how well their predictions fare is only about 70 years old It turns out that all of the predictionsthat the phagotrophy first idea ever generated have failed. Now Poole and Pennargue that new criteria, instead of predictions, should be used to evaluate the relative merits of hypotheses concerning eukaryote origin. A brief response would seem in order.
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