Year: 2022

METRIC SCALE CONNECTIONS. "If emergence happens over disparate size scales, then the reason is usually a causal relation across different scales." https://lnkd.in/dN5A7Kw https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence#CITEREFAnderson1972 View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE meditates for three weekends on the sea change in thinking that allows for all creatures to be mosaic hybrids, holobionts. The issue of what is an individual is central to this question. This will be followed by a fairly lengthy consideration of symbiotic organisms that are vertically inherited as if part of the host body. The two contemplations together represent a veritable paradigm shift in life science thinking since 1970. View in LinkedIn

MOSAIC MONSTERS BOLTED TOGETHER. "Animals are symbiotic complexes of many species living together." https://lnkd.in/ddVyNR5 View in LinkedIn

OLD PARADIGM. "Anatomical, physiological, and developmental criteria were conceived solely in terms of individuals, and the Darwinian view of life regarded aggregates of individuals of common ancestry as identifiable units in competition with one another." View in LinkedIn

LOSS OF INDIVIDUALITY. "Animals cannot be considered individuals by anatomical or physiological criteria because a diversity of symbionts are both present and functional in completing metabolic pathways and serving other physiological functions. Similarly, these new studies have shown that animal development is incomplete without symbionts. View in LinkedIn

HOLOBIONT. "Symbionts also constitute a second mode of genetic inheritance, providing selectable genetic variation for natural selection. The immune system also develops, in part, in dialogue with symbionts and thereby functions as a mechanism for integrating microbes into the animal-cell community." View in LinkedIn

"SYMBIOSIS is becoming a core principle of contemporary biology, and it is replacing an essentialist conception of “individuality” with a conception congruent with the larger systems approach now pushing the life sciences in diverse directions. These findings lead us into directions that transcend the self/nonself, subject/object dichotomies that have characterized Western thought." View in LinkedIn

NEW BLUEPRINT. "Recognizing the “holobiont”—the multicellular eukaryote plus its colonies of persistent symbionts—as a critically important unit of anatomy, development, physiology, immunology, and evolution opens up new investigative avenues and conceptually challenges the ways in which the biological subdisciplines have heretofore characterized living entities." View in LinkedIn

SYMBIONT INHERITANCE. "This reorientation is not new for the microbial or botanical sciences. In the world of protists, hereditary symbiosis, the inheritance of acquired symbionts is legion. In the microbial world, “you are what you eat” can be taken literally." View in LinkedIn

BOTANISTS VERSUS ZOOLOGISTS. "In botanical science, the concept of the autonomous individual has also been challenged by discoveries concerning rhizobia, mycorrhizae, and endocytic fungae. Nonetheless, zoologists long subscribed to a more individualist conception of the organism, since the role of microbial symbionts had been more difficult to document in animal evolution." View in LinkedIn