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PANDA'S THUMB. "Botched jobs are common, in fact. The classic example is the panda’s thumb, which it uses to grasp bamboo. “The panda’s true thumb is committed to another role. So the panda must…settle for an enlarged wrist bone and a somewhat clumsy, but quite workable, solution,” wrote Stephen Jay Gould in 1978." https://lnkd.in/dv-JiV6 View in LinkedIn

PATCHED TOGETHER. "The eyes of many taxa record their evolutionary history in their imperfect design. The vertebrate eye, for instance, is built "backwards and upside down", requiring "photons of light to travel through the cornea, lens, aqueous fluid, blood vessels, ganglion cells, amacrine cells, horizontal cells, and bipolar cells before they reach the light-sensitive rods and cones that transduce the light signal into neural impulses, which are then sent to the visual cortex at the back of the brain for processing into meaningful patterns." https://lnkd.in/decez8M View in LinkedIn

NUMEROUS SIMILAR INVENTIONS. "Certain components of the eye, such as the visual pigments, appear to have a common ancestry: that is, they evolved once, before the animals radiated. However, complex, image-forming eyes evolved some 50 to 100 times – using many of the same proteins and genetic toolkits in their construction." https://lnkd.in/dgxtAku View in LinkedIn

IMMUNE SYSTEM. "In a fascinating inversion of this view of life, however, recent studies have shown that an individual's immune system is in part created by the resident microbiome. In vertebrates, the gut-associated lymphoid tissue is specified and organized by bacterial symbionts. The immune system does not function properly and its repertoire is significantly reduced when symbiotic microbes are absent in the gut." https://lnkd.in/ddVyNR5 View in LinkedIn

"THE EYE of the Trilobite was already highly sophisticated by Cambrian time - yet, it was hardly a perfect design - rather, it resulted from the tinkering of natural selection on the genomic ingredients that already existed." https://lnkd.in/dfRbEgj View in LinkedIn

OLD PARADIGM. "The immune individual rejects anything that is not “self.” Accordingly, if it were not for the immune system, opportunistic infections would prevail (as they do in cases of immune deficiencies) and the organism would perish." https://lnkd.in/ddVyNR5 View in LinkedIn

RAPID MICROBE EVOLUTION. "​In a decade bacteria can produce 200,000 generations — about the number of generations of humans there have been since our lineage split from that of chimpanzees. So it’s hardly surprising that in less than a human lifespan we’ve seen the evolution of new diseases such as HIV and numerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria."​ https://lnkd.in/dv-JiV6 View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE continues the contemplation of self in a biological sense. Our mindset is geared to assume that individuality is a reality in living organisms, and that competition between individuals is the grist of natural selection, niche expansion, and eventual speciation. But a new perspective is emerging, that the individual is a community of species that co-evolve, collaborate, and are inseparable. View in LinkedIn

HUMAN VERSUS VIRUS. "We might like to think of ourselves as the most “highly evolved” species but, in terms of how many rounds of mutation and selection we’ve undergone, we are one of the least evolved species. Around 10 billion new viral particles can be produced every day in the body of a person infected with HIV. By contrast, the total human population on Earth was no more than a few million until a few thousand years ago."​ https://lnkd.in/dv-JiV6 View in LinkedIn

A MERE BLINK OF THE EYE. "We have no idea what future evolution has in store for humans. Biologically, modern humans have only been in existence for about 200,000 years, a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms; culturally and technologically, advanced human societies have only arisen in the last 4000 years or so, an even more miniscule timespan when placed against the history of life on earth." https://lnkd.in/dq73Az6 View in LinkedIn