Month: September 2022

ACCUMULATING COMPLEXITY. "For if there is any purpose legible at all in the millennia of human history, it is in the unflagging persistence with which we add to the complexity of the universe." This has been the pervasive mantra since Darwin. https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

THE COMPLEXIFICATION PARADIGM. "The textbook depiction of the evolution of life on earth is that of an ascent toward a steadily increasing organismal complexity: from primitive protocells to prokaryotic cells to the eukaryotic cell to multicellular organisms to animals to humans, the crowning achievement of the entire history of life." https://lnkd.in/egqWFZp View in LinkedIn

DAVID ATTENBOROUGH. "We are a plague on the Earth...Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/earthnews/9815862/Humans-are-plague-on-Earth-Attenborough.html View in LinkedIn

EVOLUTION AS COMPLEXITY ACCUMULATION. "Recent evolutionary reconstructions challenge this notion. Two notable examples are the reconstruction of the complex archaeal ancestor and the intron-rich ancestor of eukaryotes. In both cases, evolution in most of the lineages was apparently dominated by extensive loss of genes and introns, respectively." https://lnkd.in/egqWFZp View in LinkedIn

VAST GENE LOSSES. "It has been well known for decades that the evolution of numerous parasitic and symbiotic organisms entails simplification rather than complexification. In particular, bacteria that evolve from free-living forms to obligate intracellular parasites can lose up to 95% of their gene repertoires without compromising the ancestral set of highly conserved genes involved in core cellular functions." https://lnkd.in/egqWFZp View in LinkedIn

REDUCTIVE EVOLUTION. "The mitochondria, the ubiquitous energy-transforming organelles of eukaryotes, and the chloroplasts, the organelles responsible for the eukaryotic photosynthesis, are the ultimate realizations of bacterial reductive evolution. However, such reductive evolution, its paramount importance for eukaryotes notwithstanding, was considered to represent a highly specialized trend in the history of life." https://lnkd.in/egqWFZp View in LinkedIn

FIRST TENDENCIES. "There are effectively irrefutable arguments for a genuine increase in complexity during evolution. Indeed, the successive emergence of higher grades of complexity throughout the history of life is impossible to ignore." https://lnkd.in/egqWFZp View in LinkedIn

TWO PHASES OF EVOLUTION. "These and many other cases of reductive evolution are consistent with a general model composed of two distinct evolutionary phases: the short, explosive, innovation phase that leads to an abrupt increase in genome complexity, followed by a much longer reductive phase, which encompasses either a neutral ratchet of genetic material loss or adaptive genome streamlining." https://lnkd.in/egqWFZp View in LinkedIn

CHRONIC GENE LOSS WITH BURSTS OF GAINS. "The findings that in many if not most lineages evolution is dominated by gene (and more generally, DNA) loss that occurs in a roughly clock-like manner whereas gene gain occurs in bursts associated with the emergence of major new groups of organisms imply a biphasic model of evolution." https://lnkd.in/egqWFZp View in LinkedIn

GENE AND INTRON REDUCTION. "The complex archaeal ancestor and the intron-rich ancestor of eukaryotes. In both cases, evolution in most of the lineages was apparently dominated by extensive loss of genes and introns, respectively." https://lnkd.in/egqWFZp View in LinkedIn