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AUTOPOLYPLOID. "Definition of autopolyploid: an individual or strain whose chromosome complement consists of more than two complete copies of the genome of a single ancestral species." https://lnkd.in/ewCPSzA View in LinkedIn

VAST NUMBER OF POLYPLOID SPECIES. "Our survey found that 53.2% of polyploid taxa were unnamed and that c. 24% of all plant taxa were polyploids. Assuming these numbers are representative for angiosperms, we estimate that there may be an additional c. 51 000–61 000 cryptic polyploid species." https://lnkd.in/eee56_B View in LinkedIn

POLYPLOIDY PLANTS. "How many unnamed polyploid flowering plant species exist in nature? Current estimates suggest there are c. 350 000 named flowering plant species with another 10–20% to be named in general." https://lnkd.in/eee56_B View in LinkedIn

MEIOTIC MISHAP. "Environmental stress often triggers unreduced gamete production, suggesting that unreduced gametes may facilitate polyploid speciation in response to changing environments. Thus, although unreduced gamete formation may be a meiotic mishap, we suggest that unreduced gametes can be more explicitly considered as a mechanism for evolutionary speciation that should be measured and tested across and within lineages for exaptive evolution (a feature with evolutionary utility that has not arisen under conventional selective pressure) and evolvability (the capacity to generate adaptive genetic variation)." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168952514001590 View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this brief venture into the evolution of biological information, which is at the core of life itself. Among its quandaries, and for another time, are the issues around prions and viruses. They contain biological information, but many scientists consider them non-living despite being able to replicate and to evolve. There is always more to learn. View in LinkedIn

ORIGIN OF LIFE. “The emergence of life was probably marked by a transition in information processing capabilities.” http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869 View in LinkedIn

DIGITAL TRANSITION. “Purely analogue life forms could have existed in the past but are not likely to survive over geological timescales without acquiring explicitly digitized informational protocols. Therefore, life forms that ‘go digital’ may be the only systems that survive in the long-run and are thus the only remaining product of the processes that led to life.” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn

INFORMATION THEORY. “We have presented a framework for understanding the origin of life as a transition in causal structure, and information management and control, whereby information gains causal efficacy over the matter it is instantiated in.” http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869 View in LinkedIn

INFORMATION FLOW. “We have argued that living and non-living matter differ fundamentally in the way information is organized and flows through the system: biological systems are distinctive because information manipulates the matter it is instantiated in. This leads to a very different, context-dependent, causal narrative—with causal influences running both up and down the hierarchy of structure of biological systems (i.e. from state to dynamical rules and dynamical rules to the state).” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn

HALLMARK OF LIFE. “The division of labour implicit in bimolecular life bestows one very obvious and distinctive advantage; it enables the instructions to be physically separated and stored away from the hardware that implements them. The ‘arm's length’ control implicit in this division is exercised via a software channel—encoded transactions using messengers and specialized bilingual agents that identify, and are read by a system that can decode the instructions. Thus, the algorithm inhabits one molecular universe and its products inhabit another. We consider this separation to be one of the hallmarks of life.” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn