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FUNCTIONAL EVOLUTION. “So, if the idea that microbial consortia are units of selection is to be borne out, it might be better to focus on evolutionary processes at a functional level, not the taxonomic level of partner organisms and their lineages.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

COMMUNITY COEVOLUTION. “And pairwise, species-on-species coevolution involving a macrobe and hundreds or thousands of microbial lineages independently seems unlikely, if not impossible. There is no obvious mechanism by which the latter could evolve collectively (but see below as to how they might appear to do so).” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

HORIZONTAL GENE TRANSFER. “What primarily undermines this claim, that holobionts (or biofilms) as collectives might be units of selection, is the failure of the lineages they comprise to reproduce as collectives—to exhibit coordinated vertical inheritance.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

Persimmon pudding with Jack Daniels laced whipped cream tops off Thansgiving Day. View in LinkedIn

ZERO EMISSIONS FACTORY. “The subduction factory processes raw materials such as oceanic sediments and oceanic crust and manufactures magmas and continental crust as products. Aqueous fluids, which are extracted from oceanic raw materials via dehydration reactions during subduction, dissolve particular elements and overprint such elements onto the mantle wedge to generate chemically distinct arc basalt magmas.” https://lnkd.in/dz8gj2C5 View in LinkedIn

POORLY DEFINED. “It is our view that both holobionts and biofilms are so disunified as classes that no general resolution of such claims can reasonably be expected. The focus of the now quite heated debate around the widespread use of ‘‘holobiont’’ and ‘‘hologenome’’ is most often on claim (3) above.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

Agave americana has remarkable hydrophobicity of its cuticle, whose macro structure beaded drops of rain magnify. View in LinkedIn

MICROBIAL ECOSYSTEMS. “A similar set of ideas informs research and philosophizing about biofilms, structured microbial communities embedded in an extracellular matrix, not necessarily associated with an animal or plant.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

CONSERVATION OF ENERGY. “The antiuniverse provides a symmetric accounting term to exactly cancel any such net positive energy, since its overall mass-energy has negative energy equal to the positive total of our universe's mass-energy.” https://lnkd.in/gDaxUYAS View in LinkedIn

GRAVITATIONAL DEFICIT. “Further, our universe may turn out to have a positive total energy because of the deficit in gravitational energy (considered as negative in sign) implied by the increasing rate of its expansion.” https://lnkd.in/gDaxUYAS View in LinkedIn