Year: 2022

ALTERNATIVE SOLUTION. “The gravity of mass concentrations in the antiuniverse would be a much more elegant mechanism than the vast numbers of primordial black holes which have been suggested as an explanation.” https://lnkd.in/gDaxUYAS View in LinkedIn

WONDERFUL CLASSIC. “As important to modern world views as any work of Darwin, Marx, or Freud, Lyell's Principles of Geology has never before been available in paperback. In the second of three volumes, Lyell (1797-1875) continues his uniformitarian argument of Volume I—the physical features of the earth are endlessly fluctuating around a stable mean—but focuses on organic rather than inorganic processes.” https://lnkd.in/dMupmD5Q View in LinkedIn

Xanthoria parientina is one of few creatures that can survive for years in outer space. What utility could this have possibly served? ;) View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE for this and next weekend features work by Professor W. Ford Doolittle, and his highly original concept that evolution acts at the level of metabolic or massive biogeochemical cycles not at the level of species in microorganisms very active with horizontal gene transfer. Richard Dawkins had previously proposed that the unit of selection was the gene. This is the other end of the spectrum. https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

W. FORD DOOLITTLE. “As of 2007, he has been Professor Emeritus at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He received his BA in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard University in 1963 and his PhD from Stanford University in 1967, under Charles Yanofsky. He went on to do postdoctoral fellowships with Sol Spiegelman and Norman R. Pace.” https://lnkd.in/dAPAVZgH View in LinkedIn

EVOLUTION OF COMPLEX LIFE. “The resulting network of electron transfers led a gas composition of Earth's atmosphere that is far from thermodynamic equilibrium (i.e. it is an emergent property), yet is relatively stable on geological time scales. https://lnkd.in/dvRBqTd9 View in LinkedIn

MACRO COGS MICRO. “The biogeochemical cycles of H, C, N, O and S are coupled via biologically catalysed electron transfer (redox) reactions.” https://lnkd.in/dvRBqTd9 View in LinkedIn

THE REFRAIN. “It’s the song, not the singer: an exploration of holobiosis and evolutionary theory.” (2016). https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

RADICAL PROPOSITION. “We propose casting metabolic and developmental interaction patterns, rather than the taxa responsible for them, as units of selection.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

HYBRID COMMUNITIES. “Animals and plants together with all the microbes in and on them are now often called ‘‘holobionts’’, and the ensembles of their genomes ‘‘hologenomes’’.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn