Category: Uncategorized

TOWERS OF BABEL. “As biologists have methodically surveyed the characteristics of living systems at the multiple scales of molecular, cellular, organismal, and ecological organization, seminal discoveries and technical advances have spawned entirely new fields of research that quickly develop their own themes, vocabularies, and research culture.” https://bmcsystbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1752-0509-8-S2-S1 View in LinkedIn

SILO SCIENCE. “The modern history of biological and medical sciences can be summarized in three words: ever-increasing specialization.” https://lnkd.in/ewVanRj View in LinkedIn

THE NEXT SECTION focuses on reductionism versus wholism, how they arose, and the consequences of each. View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this section on the impact of the discovery of the giant viruses, the bridge between more streamlined and outsourced, supposedly simpler, viruses that many consider, at best, to be in twilight life states, and truly living cells. Our human-centric view of the natural world is veering towards a tipping point of a revision. We are a tiny minority of the life forms on the planet. View in LinkedIn

ABANDONING REDUCTIONISM. “Rather than returning along the same path in a constructionist approach that simply builds upon this knowledge, but in reverse, an alternative is to close the circle with synthetic constructions that seek to integrate the full complexity of biological and physiological systems (understanding the whole).” http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1535370214564534 View in LinkedIn

WORK STILL TO DO. “Some of the most exciting ideas on viral evolution, such as the fourth-domain hypothesis, do not survive phylogenomic scrutiny. However, the emerging picture of virus evolution is hardly less remarkable.” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.12728/full View in LinkedIn

2500 YEARS OF BIOLOGY. “Our hermeneutic circle summarizes the course of experimental biology through 2500 years of the achievements of reductionist research (understanding the parts), which culminates in our ability to rapidly sequence the genome.” http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1535370214564534 View in LinkedIn

ENGULFMENT REMAINS. “For all dsDNA viruses of eukaryotes, we can detect clear ancestry among viruses (and in some cases, plasmids) of bacteria, an observation that is compatible with the key role of the (proto)mitochondrial endosymbiont (and possibly other bacterial symbionts) in the evolution of eukaryotes.” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.12728/full View in LinkedIn

INTERPRETIVE THEORIES. “The new cover of Experimental Biology and Medicine features the hermeneutic circle of biology, a concept we have adapted from the hermeneutic principle that one understands the whole only in terms of each part and the parts only in terms of the whole.” https://lnkd.in/dgZEzC6 View in LinkedIn

EMERGING PRINCIPLES. “One such key principle is the unity of the evolutionary processes among viruses and capsid-less selfish elements. However, the equally fundamental, complementary principle is the evolutionary persistence of viral morphogenetic modules.” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.12728/full View in LinkedIn