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GRAVE DISAPPEARANCE. "Genetically regulated programmed cell death is a phenotype that is characterized by the rapid disappearance of the cell that is expressing it. In other words, genes that encode effectors of programmed cell death can be viewed as allowing a phenotype that is the grave of the genome that expresses them." http://www.nature.com/cdd/journal/v9/n4/full/4400950a.html View in LinkedIn

PHAGE ARMS RACE. "In the prokaryote world, competition for environmental resources is not restricted to competition between different bacterial species. Infectious agents, such as plasmids and bacteriophage viruses, also compete with bacteria: in this case, it is the bacteria itself that is the resource, and the evolutionary arms race involves the spreading of the heterogeneous mobile genetic elements in the bacterial colony." http://www.nature.com/cdd/journal/v9/n4/full/4400950a.html View in LinkedIn

PHENOTYPIC SELECTION. "Natural selection does not act directly on genes, but on the phenotypes they allow the cell that encodes them to achieve. Genetic mutation leads to genetic diversification, and hence to phenotypic diversity. Natural selection sanctioned by death is a process of competition between phenotypes whereby genomes allowing for poorly adapted phenotypes do not get transmitted into the next generation, while genomes that allow fitter phenotypes become selected. http://www.nature.com/cdd/journal/v9/n4/full/4400950a.html View in LinkedIn

LINEAR EXTENSION. "The ability to self-destruct may have simply evolved as a consequence of a capacity to kill others." http://www.nature.com/cdd/journal/v9/n4/full/4400950a.html View in LinkedIn

UNICELLULAR AVOIDANCE. "Genetic programs allowing regulated cell suicide would have been obligatorily counterselected in single-celled organisms." http://www.nature.com/cdd/journal/v9/n4/full/4400950a.html View in LinkedIn

RADICAL NEW VIEW. "Genome reduction as the dominant mode of evolution. A common belief is that evolution generally proceeds towards greater complexity at both the organismal and the genomic level, numerous examples of reductive evolution of parasites and symbionts notwithstanding. However, recent evolutionary reconstructions challenge this notion." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.201300037/full View in LinkedIn

SIMPLICITY NOT SELECTED. "Most processes in eukaryotes generally evolve toward complexity, presumably because complexity provides more regulatory opportunities and perhaps also because there is no selective pressure to enforce simplicity." Not always true. https://lnkd.in/d8Qr_bk View in LinkedIn

MANTRA OF COMPLEXIFICATION. "The textbook depiction of the evolution of life on earth is that of an ascent toward a steadily increasing organismal complexity: from primitive protocells to prokaryotic cells to the eukaryotic cell to multicellular organisms to animals to humans, the crowning achievement of the entire history of life." https://lnkd.in/egqWFZp View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE. It is generally thought that evolution is the march towards greater structural and genetic complexity. Not quite so simple. Genetic outsourcing during genetic streamlining is deceptive. It actually increases genetic complexity, and amplifies gene capabilities by appropriation of host genes during the symbiotic or parasitic lifestyle, not just being genetic simplification or genome reduction. Remember the reversal of polyploidy during plant evolution? View in LinkedIn

"MALE SELF-SACRIFICE”, or apparent male cooperation with female cannibalism, is part of male copulatory behavior in several spider species, and in some insects. One study also reported that males of the spider Argiope aurantia spontaneously die when they copulate." http://www.esciencecentral.org/journals/are-internal-death-promoting-mechanisms-ever-adaptive-2329-9002.1000113.pdf View in LinkedIn