Here and there or everywhere?

BioScience, October, 2004 by Marc-Andre Lachance

Whether or not the notion that "everything is everywhere" is "taken for granted by most" (Fenchel and Finlay 2004) remains to be seen, but one cannot deny that the proposition has had stifling effects on microbial community ecology in the last century. And Tom Fenchel and Bland Finlay seem determined to perpetuate the myth of ubiquity despite all evidence to the contrary. They simply brush away serious criticisms of ubiquity (Foissner 1999, Coleman 2002, Whitaker et al. 2003) and disregard reports of endemism or vicariant distributions in microorganisms (Cho and Tiedje 2000, Curtis et al. 2002, Bohonak and Jenkins 2003, Darling et al. 2004).

The idea that small organisms are randomly spread over the planet, first formulated by Baas-Becking (Quispel 1998) and recently...