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SO ENDS the reminder that the message of the Flammarion engraving of 1888 is as true today as it was back then, and however much we may pat ourselves on the back about the progress of science, we are still primitive hominids living in the dark ages. The roar of applause for Nobel Laureates may be humbled by the pall of darkness we live in. Less than one percent of life is known. It is our epitaph. View in LinkedIn

BOMBSHELL. “I contend that the cell nucleus itself is of viral origin.” https://lnkd.in/gVBURjk View in LinkedIn

HAND BEHIND THE WHEEL. “Patrick Forterre of the University of Paris-Sud has also analyzed enzymes responsible for DNA replication and has concluded that the genes for such enzymes in eukaryotes probably have a viral origin.” https://lnkd.in/gVBURjk View in LinkedIn

RADICAL PROPOSAL. “Viruses may originate genes, then colonize two different lineages—for example, bacteria and vertebrates. A gene apparently bestowed on humanity by bacteria may have been given to both by a virus.” https://lnkd.in/gVBURjk View in LinkedIn

FORGET SPECIES. “Quasispecies theory has encouraged viewing and examining viruses as complex mutant spectra, and not merely as simple genetic entities that can be described with a defined nucleotide sequence, as believed only a few decades ago.” https://lnkd.in/gDaeFeM View in LinkedIn

SUPERORGANISM. “A realization of recent years is that mutant swarms are not mere collections of mutants ranked by a mutation-selection balance that act independently of each other. Rather, very often the mutant ensemble acts as a unit of selection due to interactions among its members. The result of these interactions is that evolution operates at the level of the population, a process often called ‘group selection”.” https://lnkd.in/gDaeFeM View in LinkedIn

NUMEROUS FOCI. “Mutant swarms are established within single infected cells and cell clusters and in infected organisms during disease episodes, outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics.” https://lnkd.in/gDaeFeM View in LinkedIn

GIANT POPULATIONS. "An important aspect of the quasispecies concept is that the large size of virus populations enables positive and negative interactions between individual viruses to establish a quasi-equilibrium of the variant proportions. Genetic variation is generated by the accumulation of mutations during replication and their re-arrangement by genetic recombination, and genome segment reassortment in the case of segmented genomes." https://lnkd.in/dC3CR5F View in LinkedIn

RECENT DIVERGENCE. "Studies of species that have recently evolved separate sexes are ideal for testing the idea that hermaphrodites are selected to ‘compromise’ between male and female functions, an important test case for the existence of trade-offs between different functions." https://lnkd.in/exrSaeb View in LinkedIn

MUTANT SWARMS. "Viral quasispecies are currently defined as collections of closely related viral genomes subjected to a continuous process of genetic variation, competition among the variants generated, and selection of the most fit distributions in a given environment." https://lnkd.in/dC3CR5F View in LinkedIn