Month: September 2022

FUNCTIONAL SELECTION. “For something like the human gut microbiome, where the maternally inherited microbiome (in vaginal birth) is replaced early in childhood, the fact that adult microbiomes bear even a loose similarity to each other must be due to similar patterns of recruitment and/or maintenance based on gene function, not on taxonomy per se.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

“TIME has independent ultimate significance; it is of more majesty and more provocative of awe than even a sky studded with stars. Gliding gently in the most ancient of all splendors, it tells so much more than space can say in its broken language of things, playing symphonies upon instruments of isolated beings, unlocking the earth and making it happen.” (Abraham Joshua Heschel). https://lnkd.in/d4gKekD8 View in LinkedIn

A cross section of wood tells a unique history of development frozen in time, patterns inscrutible to us of small victories and Hurculean striggles. View in LinkedIn

SONG VS SINGER. “So, how might we imagine that it is the song (the collective metabolic and other interaction patterns that support putative holobionts) and not the singers (the sometimes variable and horizontally acquired organismal lineages that carry them out) that is primarily of evolutionary interest in holobionts and biofilms?” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

NETWORKS NOT GENES. “Wagner argues that ‘‘it is the historical continuity of gene regulatory networks rather than the expression of individual homologous genes that underlies the homology of morphological characters’’.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

NETWORKS AS FUNCTIONAL GROUPS. “Regulatory networks of this type are in a sense patterns only, functionally characterized relationships that can be said to bear at least minimal relations of ancestry and descent.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

REGULATORY NETWORKS. “It is not clear where such entities would belong in any overtly materialist biological hierarchy (cells, organisms, species, etc.), whether they are outcomes of major transitions, or even whether any explanatory goal would be served by answering such questions. Nevertheless they are arguably recognizable songs, performed by a panoply of diverse genealogically embedded singers over the course of evolutionary history.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

FUNCTIONAL EVOLUTION. “We propose a similar perspective on the multilineage metabolic networks and other interaction patterns that are often instantiated by holobionts and other microbial consortia (Fig. 1). These are persistent functionally characterizable patterns that, despite being uncoupled from specific taxa, coherently exhibit relations of identity, and which change over evolutionary time.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

NEW REPLICATOR. “In a recent review on the history of microbial ontology, one of us (Doolittle 2013) argued for considering interactions patterns more specifically as a kind of replicator.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

INFORMATION TRANSFER. “There is a flow of information linking nest generations through the builders. Nests and burrows are adapted for the growth of burrow builders and nest-makers. Those interactors carry the information through which the nest is replicated. Bateson was right: sometimes, perhaps always, nests meet Dawkins’ definition of a replicator, and they meet ours too.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn