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South Pacific islands ban western junk food and go organic View in LinkedIn

RUBBISH IN, RUBBISH OUT. "Natural selection cannot create novel, perfect species because it only selects on existing variations in a population." https://lnkd.in/d3pZ6np View in LinkedIn

MANY FALSE STARTS. "Instead of a stair-step, with humans at the top, we stand alongside the kangaroo and the platypus, each of us at the end of its own narrow road. If we look back, into the past, we can see those paths turn and branch and cul-de-sac. Go far enough, and our paths meet at a crossroads. But in between that common ancestor and ourselves, the road is littered with cousins that didn't quite make it." https://lnkd.in/dN-S25a View in LinkedIn

RIDICULOUS NATURE. "Evolution is sometimes messy or even outright ridiculous." https://lnkd.in/dQkpR4e View in LinkedIn

MESSY BIOLOGY. "Biological messiness relates to infidelity, heterogeneity, stochastic noise and variation--both genetic and phenotypic--at all levels, from single proteins to organisms. Messiness comes from the complexity and evolutionary history of biological systems and from the high cost of accuracy. For better or for worse, messiness is inherent to biology. It also provides the raw material for physiological and evolutionary adaptations to new challenges." https://lnkd.in/dA6dYav View in LinkedIn

DERIVED DERIVATIVE BRANCH. "Any living thing must be thought of as the product of a long line of ancestors and itself the potential ancestor of a line of descendants." (Page 6). https://lnkd.in/edngiXm View in LinkedIn

OPPORTUNISTIC PATCHWORK. "Living organisms are historical structures: literally creations of history. They represent not a perfect product of engineering, but a patchwork of odd sets patched together when and where opportunities arose." (François Jacob). https://lnkd.in/e9R4Dch View in LinkedIn

WHY DO BABIES CRY? If your face had to do this in nine months, you would cry too. http://m.9gag.com/gag/a09XLGX/the-formation-of-the-human-face-as-found-through-scans-of-a-developing-embryo View in LinkedIn

HACKED MENAGERIE. "Why I love the most awkward, absurd, hacked-together species. The result is a remarkable menagerie of weirdness. Fish with eyes that migrate across their heads as they develop. Lizards that defend themselves by shooting three-foot streams of blood from their own eyes. Pigs with tusks that grow back toward their faces and occasionally grow so long that they fatally pierce the pig’s skull." https://lnkd.in/dkABWYn View in LinkedIn

TWO HISTORIES. "Life is a dynamic process, and organismal structures disclose the history of the two principal levels of biological change: evolutionary and developmental. Vestiges (from the Latin vestigium, for footprint) reveal traces of prior states. Like actual footprints, vestiges offer glimpses of what was once there but is no longer present. In biological terms, they reveal former evolutionary and developmental conditions, and in this way they offer valuable keys to unlock the past." http://evolution-outreach.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-014-0012-5 View in LinkedIn