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THE FEW PERCENTAGE CROWD. “In this darkness there is a small admixture, a few percent of the whole, which consists of the ordinary multi-cellular eukaryotic life that makes up the fungi and plants and animals and us. As such, the properties and behavior of biological dark matter comprise what might be termed, metaphorically, quantum biology.” https://standardsingenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40793-016-0180-8 View in LinkedIn

“PHENOTYPIC PLASTICITY results from the developmental and behavioral responses of genotypes to environmental influences, and operates both within and across generations.” https://lnkd.in/dAmAVYa View in LinkedIn

MINOR PLAYERS IN UNPEAR-SHAPED WORLD. “Prokaryotes comprise about half the biomass of the non-viral biosphere and nearly all of its physiological biodiversity (defined in terms of diversity of tolerated ecological conditions and biochemical capacities). To paraphrase Weinberg, our biosphere is mostly biological dark matter.” (Half the biomass is understated: today, we have only described, let alone characterized,

“BIOLOGICAL DARK MATTER, akin to cosmological dark matter, is an apt descriptor for this overwhelming and unseen component of the biosphere. These studies are forcing us to recognize that, rather than typifying life, multi-cellular eukaryotes are actually a derived and highly constrained evolutionary subset of the biosphere.” https://standardsingenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40793-016-0180-8 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

WRENCHING CHANGES. “Not only will biodiversity informatics need to deal with an explosion in the amount of biodiversity-relevant data, it may well need to accommodate data that are of a conceptually different form. As any informatics professional knows, making changes to an underlying data model is always difficult and fraught with risk. Making changes to conceptual base classes is the hardest of all. This will be the world of 21st Century biodiversity informatics.” https://standardsingenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40793-016-0180-8 View in LinkedIn

WE RETURN to the bold attempt to revise our pear-shaped view of the natural world, which has been cast with a chordate-centric viewpoint, oblivious of the much larger and, until recently, unseen, prokaryotic universe. The prokaryotic universe is the greatest source of global biodiversity, and it is neither based on the individual nor the species. All very confounding for our earnest and bespectacled colleagues in gumboots. https://standardsingenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40793-016-0180-8 View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this expansion of the observation of the rapid evolution of Great Tits’ beaks in response to bird feeders in the UK. The backstory tells us that this is a broad trend across taxa, and that it is particularly observed in response to human disruption. The opportunity to watch in real time vertebrate evolution in the making is an extraordinary step forward, as such studies in the past have been confined to yeast and bacteria. View in LinkedIn

ACCESSIBLE TO STUDY. “Empirically, the reality of contemporary evolution means that many evolutionary processes thought approachable only by inferential study, such as speciation, can now be studied directly.” https://lnkd.in/dAmAVYa View in LinkedIn