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DEATH FOR FITNESS. "If a large organism can build itself from a single cell, why can it not maintain itself once built? Or can organismal death actually be adaptive in some cases, in the sense of increasing Darwinian fitness?" https://lnkd.in/ecP3KMX View in LinkedIn

SELF-INFLICTED DEATH. "Two main categories of putative programmed organismal death: senescence in macro-organisms and programmed cell death in unicellular microorganisms." https://lnkd.in/ecP3KMX View in LinkedIn

HIGHER LEVEL SELECTION. "If death is the function of programmed organismal death (i.e., if programmed organismal death is an adaptation for promoting death), then programmed organismal death must be selected for at a level other than the organism level." https://lnkd.in/ecP3KMX View in LinkedIn

PROGRAMMED ORGANISMAL DEATH. "This review was motivated by the observation that diverse organisms apparently have such active, internal death-promoting mechanisms and by the subtle and difficult conceptual issues that understanding the evolution of this kind of trait raises." https://lnkd.in/ecP3KMX View in LinkedIn

DEATH AS ADAPTIVE. "A common theme in all the hypotheses discussed above is that the organism is the primary unit of selection. In contrast, other authors have advanced alternative views for the adaptive value of programmed organismal death in a multilevel selection framework. Among those authors that accept organismal death as programmed, many also support the hypothesis that death is adaptive, generally at a level of function other than the individual organism." https://lnkd.in/ecP3KMX View in LinkedIn

ADAPTIVE DEATH. "How could an inherited trait that promotes death, rather than survival, possibly be adaptive?" https://lnkd.in/ecP3KMX View in LinkedIn

SENESCENCE AS BYPRODUCT. "Most evolutionary explanations of organismal senescence are based on individual selection or selective neutrality, and interpret senescence as a byproduct rather than an adaptation selected for its own sake." https://lnkd.in/ecP3KMX View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this first of two weekend Fragments on extinctions versus diversity explosions during the history of life. The staggering facts that 99% of life that ever existed has gone extinct, amounting to an estimated 5 billion species, are a snapshot of both the robustness of life, and that it hangs like a thread in the flow of time. Looking around at the diversity around us, it seems hard to fathom. But each expansive radiation of life post-extinction takes about 5 million years, as we will see next weekend. Breathtaking numbers. View in LinkedIn

INTERNAL TRIGGERS. "These experiments indicate that rapid senescence and death following reproduction in at least some semelparous animals are genetically “programmed” and internally controlled." https://lnkd.in/ecP3KMX View in LinkedIn

DIVERSITY EXPLOSIONS. “The most dramatic and creative evolutionary role of mass extinctions is the promotion of postextinction diversifications, typified most vividly by the exuberant radiation of the mammals after the demise of the dinosaurs and other reptilian clades at or near the end-Cretaceous boundary.” https://lnkd.in/epHhn4i) View in LinkedIn