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A most curious stone ornament in Girona, dated 1732, whose meaning (at least to me) is obscure, but clearly not so to its creators: lost in time. View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this last of two weekends on the unit of selection in communities of microbes. Philosophers of biofilms, those who meditate on sludges and slimes, have an honorable calling, since these creatures are key in our own health and disease, and key in massive biogeochemical cycles that self-regulate our entire planet. https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

PLANETARY BIOGEOCHEMICAL CYCLES. “It is the maintenance by diverse and inconstant microbial taxa of the quasi-stable metabolic and developmental interactions that sustain not only supposed holobionts and biofilms but all life on this planet that we have aimed to address.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

THE ONLY TIME. “Only one instant of time, the present or the antipresent, would ever have existed in each universe.” https://lnkd.in/gDaxUYAS View in LinkedIn

DARWINIAN NEED. “Lineages evolve to carry out their steps because in each case it is selectively advantageous to individuals (or their genes) within those lineages to do so. There is no need to envision the independent evolution, by some onerous collective mechanism, of similar patterns in thousands of individual holobiont species.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

TWO PLACES SIMULTANEOUSLY. “Thus the U-process unites relativity and the wave function via these continuing superpositions which only are available to any local R-process subject to lightspeed and other relativistic restrictions.” https://lnkd.in/gDaxUYAS View in LinkedIn

PRE-EXISTING RELATIONS. “Rather than seeing shared metabolisms as the products of some sort of group selection operating on individual lineages—or, in any rare mitochondria-like cases, on some hologenome—to create multilineage interactions, we imagine that such interactions already exist.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

THE CRITICAL POINT. “The totality of the past is only frozen into reality at a particular point in spacetime to the extent that information or interactions have reached it, so the U-process always contains superpositions from the very distant past as well as the future.” https://lnkd.in/gDaxUYAS View in LinkedIn

INTERRUPTIONS. “An interaction need not be continuously in operation for the evolved microbiota to resume its performance after an interruption: they are singers that already know the song. Neither a composition-based ‘‘major transitions’’ nor a ‘‘levels of selection’’ approach will accommodate this model: songs are perfomed by—but do not comprise—their singers.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

THE UNFOLDING NOW. “The U-process would permeate spacetime, providing every alternative possibility consistent with the most recent R-process, to be summed up in the next moment's R-process.” https://lnkd.in/gDaxUYAS View in LinkedIn