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KEY CAVEAT. "A cell suicide program will become counterselected unless it is regulated in such a way that the sacrifice of some individuals in a unicellular colony will benefit (or at least will not prevent) the survival of other members of the colony." http://www.nature.com/cdd/journal/v9/n4/full/4400950a.html View in LinkedIn

EPISODIC AMPLIFICATION. "Quantitatively, the evolution of genomes appears to be dominated by reduction and simplification, punctuated by episodes of complexification." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.201300037/full View in LinkedIn

0 https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/10/fruit-carving-by-takehiro-kishimoto/ View in LinkedIn

TWO PHASES OF EVOLUTION. "These and many other cases of reductive evolution are consistent with a general model composed of two distinct evolutionary phases: the short, explosive, innovation phase that leads to an abrupt increase in genome complexity, followed by a much longer reductive phase, which encompasses either a neutral ratchet of genetic material loss or adaptive genome streamlining." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.201300037/full View in LinkedIn

UNHOLY ALLIANCE. "It is interesting to think that the genetic modules that are now involved in the regulation of what we call 'altruistic' regulated programmed cell death may have initially emerged and become selected as 'selfish genetic modules', for the sole reason that encoding an executioner and an inhibitor of the executioner just made them good at propagating themselves." http://www.nature.com/cdd/journal/v9/n4/full/4400950a.html View in LinkedIn

NUANCED EXCEPTIONS. "The results here show that there is an unexpected and far-reaching difference between effects restricted to late stages and effects only concentrated at late stages, carrying with them some small crucial share of early-age effects." http://www.pnas.org/content/110/25/10141.full View in LinkedIn

IN PLAIN WORDS. "Mutation accumulation theory: From the evolutionary perspective, aging is an inevitable result of the declining force of natural selection with age." http://longevity-science.org/Evolution.htm View in LinkedIn

THE FORMAL THEORY. "The ‘mutation accumulation’ theory, first proposed by Medawar...refers to the fact that deleterious alleles with effects restricted to late stages of life equilibrate at higher frequencies at mutation–selection balance than alleles that act earlier […].” https://lnkd.in/eDZKgvJ View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this first of two weekends on reductive evolution. This report suggests that reductive evolution is not only far from being rare, rather it is a common form of evolution, characterized by explosive bursts of genomic complexity followed by slow winnowing of the chaff. This it at odds with the popular view of evolution as an inexorable ascent to complex (human) perfection. The Copernican Revolution has been slow to take hold, it seems. View in LinkedIn

FLY IN THE OINTMENT. "Suffice it to note that the largest bacterial genomes encompass almost as many genes as some “obviously” complex animals, such as for example flies, and more than many fungi." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.201300037/full View in LinkedIn