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FRAGMENT FROM NATURE continues from last weekend on the theme of surprisingly rapid evolution. The number of examples of adaptation in just generations is increasing. This speaks to enormous phenotypic plasticity, and may even give an insight into the subject of abrupt evolutionary jumps or saltations, a contentious subject. View in LinkedIn

Yes, bacon really is killing us. Where are our regulators in this mess? https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/01/bacon-cancer-processed-meats-nitrates-nitrites-sausages?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other View in LinkedIn

BACK TO BASICS. “The full incorporation of the prokaryotic realm into our understanding of the biosphere will enrich biology, but at the expense of our having to rethink and reconceptualize some of our most basic notions.” https://lnkd.in/ewnQ9Vg View in LinkedIn

PEAR-SHAPED WORLD VIEW. “Applied to the biosphere, two genomoscope discoveries are fundamental: first, most of the world’s biodiversity occurs in the prokaryotic realm, the full nature of which was unsuspected before. Second, many “foundational” biological concepts—such as the objective reality of individual organisms—are inadequate to describe and explain this emerging new world.” https://lnkd.in/ewnQ9Vg View in LinkedIn

ECOLOGICAL IMPACT. “Using comprehensive and long-term data for Darwin's finches and freshwater copepods, they conclude that population growth rate can sometimes be at least twice as sensitive to evolutionary changes as to important ecological changes in abiotic factors, such as rainfall. In other words, evolutionary change can have substantial effects on ecological dynamics.” https://lnkd.in/dAmAVYa View in LinkedIn

HYBRID ORGANISMS. “We now know that all multicellular eukaryotes are actually functional composites, holobionts, composed of more prokaryotic cells than eukaryotic cells and expressing more prokaryotic genes than eukaryotic genes. A full understanding of the biology of “individual” eukaryotes will now depend on an understanding of their associated microbiomes.” https://standardsingenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40793-016-0180-8 View in LinkedIn

SPECTRUM. “Recognition of the rate and ecological significance of adaptive evolution is heralding a new epoch where the dichotomy between ecological and evolutionary time and, more importantly, between ecological and evolutionary processes is breaking down.” https://lnkd.in/dAmAVYa View in LinkedIn

EMBEDDED IN MICROBIAL ECOSYSTEM. “Furthermore, it has long been known that every multicellular organism coexists with large prokaryotic ecosystems—microbiomes—that completely cover its surfaces, external and internal. Recent studies have shown that these associated microbiomes are not mere contamination, but instead have profound effects upon the function and fitness of the multicellular organism.” https://lnkd.in/ewnQ9Vg View in LinkedIn

JUST A CHINK OF NATURE. “Analogously, classical biology describes the familiar world of multi-cellular eukaryotes, which historically were believed to be the biosphere. New tools are now making it possible to study the vast, heretofore mostly uncharacterized, prokaryotic world of microbial life.” https://standardsingenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40793-016-0180-8 View in LinkedIn

JUST A CHINK OF THE UNIVERSE. “Steven Weinberg elegantly captured the duality between classical physics and the new quantum cosmology: “Our expanding universe is mostly dark energy and dark matter. In this darkness there is a small admixture, a few percent of the whole, which consists of the ordinary matter that makes up the stars and planets and us.” https://standardsingenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40793-016-0180-8 View in LinkedIn