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"VIRTUAL LIFE is becoming more social than the physical life." https://lnkd.in/dsHe6fk View in LinkedIn

POST CAMBRIAN TOOLKIT. "The stability of animal body plans and the underlying GRNs after the Cambrian period have resulted in many of these cis-regulatory elements being maintained ever since as sequences that evolve very slowly and in parallel in different animal groups." (GRNs = gene regulatory networks). https://lnkd.in/dTKCkih View in LinkedIn

OPEN INNOVATION. "A key factor that enables us as human beings to solve complex problems and achieve a level of dominance over a wide variety of environments from the desert to the arctic to the deep ocean is not simply our individual big brains, but our capacities for extreme sociality, to cooperate and learn from one another, and our ability to build on previous knowledge and to accumulate culture." https://lnkd.in/gMtMDwD View in LinkedIn

SLOW EVOLUTION. "CNEs are slowly evolving but not entirely frozen sequences and in some cases changes in CNEs might reflect tinkering with developmental GRNs." (GRNs = gene regulatory networks; CNEs = conserved non-coding elements). https://lnkd.in/dTKCkih View in LinkedIn

TECHNOLOGICAL SPREAD. "Cumulative culture is the engine that drives the remarkable power of the global human computer. It enables societies to act as extremely powerful computers by ratcheting up technological and other cultural innovations." https://lnkd.in/gMtMDwD View in LinkedIn

CUMULATIVE CULTURE. "Our culture is cumulative because we are born into highly constructed environments full of amazing gadgets like language and literacy." https://lnkd.in/dwNsDzt View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this contemplation of the confounding Cambrian explosion. Next weekend we consider the Great Unconformity, a period directly before the Cambrian when geologist believe that 3-5 vertical (yes, vertical) kilometers of the earth’s surface globally was erased. This could explain the missing fossil record and make the Cambrian explosion an optical illusion. Explaining the Cambrian has certainly stretched all story-telling skills. View in LinkedIn

REGULATORY VS STRUCTURAL GENES. "With each new variation, there is an alteration in the relation between the regulatory genes and the so-called structural genes that actually produce the proteins and eventually the lipids and other building blocks that make up an organism." https://lnkd.in/dx4KvtT View in LinkedIn

REGULATORY GENE EXPANSION. "What seems clear is that morphological evolution of body plans, such as is documented by Neoproterozoic and Cambrian fossils, involved increases in the complexity of both the body plans and the regulatory systems that specified them." https://lnkd.in/dx4KvtT View in LinkedIn

BODY PLAN COMPLEXITY. "Many different body plans can be specified by similar genes early within a cascade, whereas morphological complexity can be achieved by regulatory evolution in many parts of the cascade." https://lnkd.in/dx4KvtT View in LinkedIn