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NOT. "We are not individuals by genetic criteria."​ https://lnkd.in/ddVyNR5 View in LinkedIn

RIGID EXOSKELETON. "The exoskeleton also constrains arthropod evolution by introducing a big problem: how to grow."​ https://lnkd.in/dh8uqsf View in LinkedIn

MALADAPTED. "​In the case of humans, the result is a “Paleolithic” genome, which is not adapted to today’s environment and is contributing to “diseases of civilization,” including atherosclerosis and obesity."​ https://lnkd.in/dTCZavA View in LinkedIn

FIT ENOUGH. "Genes that may have been advantageous in the past may be critically unfit for individuals in today’s environment. Natural selection is not a perfect process; if an organism is “fit enough” to survive a particular environment and reproduce, its genes are passed on to the next generation. Some of these genes may increase an organism’s fitness while some may even be slightly disadvantageous."​ https://lnkd.in/dTCZavA View in LinkedIn

"EVOLUTIONARY BAGGAGE is the part of the genome of a population that was advantageous in past individuals but is disadvantageous under the pressures exerted by natural selection today."​ https://lnkd.in/dTCZavA View in LinkedIn

MESSY AND MALADADAPTIVE. "Some theorists have argued that the eukaryotic nucleus is the more primitive, burdened with inefficiencies left over from a rather messy origin of cellular life. Others, as we noted earlier, see it as replete with maladaptive genomic accumulations, which may or may not affect regulation of gene expression."​ https://lnkd.in/d6GwkCt View in LinkedIn

PANDA'S THUMB. "Botched jobs are common, in fact. The classic example is the panda’s thumb, which it uses to grasp bamboo. “The panda’s true thumb is committed to another role. So the panda must…settle for an enlarged wrist bone and a somewhat clumsy, but quite workable, solution,” wrote Stephen Jay Gould in 1978." https://lnkd.in/dv-JiV6 View in LinkedIn

PATCHED TOGETHER. "The eyes of many taxa record their evolutionary history in their imperfect design. The vertebrate eye, for instance, is built "backwards and upside down", requiring "photons of light to travel through the cornea, lens, aqueous fluid, blood vessels, ganglion cells, amacrine cells, horizontal cells, and bipolar cells before they reach the light-sensitive rods and cones that transduce the light signal into neural impulses, which are then sent to the visual cortex at the back of the brain for processing into meaningful patterns." https://lnkd.in/decez8M View in LinkedIn

NUMEROUS SIMILAR INVENTIONS. "Certain components of the eye, such as the visual pigments, appear to have a common ancestry: that is, they evolved once, before the animals radiated. However, complex, image-forming eyes evolved some 50 to 100 times – using many of the same proteins and genetic toolkits in their construction." https://lnkd.in/dgxtAku View in LinkedIn

IMMUNE SYSTEM. "In a fascinating inversion of this view of life, however, recent studies have shown that an individual's immune system is in part created by the resident microbiome. In vertebrates, the gut-associated lymphoid tissue is specified and organized by bacterial symbionts. The immune system does not function properly and its repertoire is significantly reduced when symbiotic microbes are absent in the gut." https://lnkd.in/ddVyNR5 View in LinkedIn