Month: September 2022

CROP INNOVATION. "Our present results underline that crop innovation has been a generally important factor in shaping extant leaf-cutting ant societies, as ploidy elaborations correlate both with the scale of farming (colony size) and with somatic division of labour (worker size variation) in the ant colonies rearing the crops." https://lnkd.in/enWQjrF View in LinkedIn

"POLYPLOIDY (more than two sets of chromosomes) is a competitive advantageous strategy in flowering plants, and is consistent with a history of domestication, but rarely seen in filamentous fungi." https://lnkd.in/enWQjrF View in LinkedIn

CLONAL SELECTION BY ANTS. "The filamentous fungi cultivated by leafcutter ants are highly polyploid, and correlates with a massive expansion of these ant colonies ~20 million years ago. It is believed that these were clonally selected for higher productivity by the ants." https://lnkd.in/enWQjrF View in LinkedIn

GENETIC SELECTION. "Rather than growing a single cultivar solely for nutrition, insect farmers appear to cultivate, and possibly "artificially select" for, integrated crop-microbe consortia. Indeed, crop domestication in the context of coevolving and codomesticated microbial consortia may explain the 50-million year old agricultural success of insect farmers." http://www.jstor.org/stable/30033817 View in LinkedIn

CLONAL MONOCULTURE. "Leafcutter ants depend on the cultivation of symbiotic Attamyces fungi for food, which are thought to be grown by the ants in single-strain, clonal monoculture... Monoculture eliminates cultivar-cultivar competition that would select for competitive fungal traits that are detrimental to the ants." View in LinkedIn

LEAFCUTTER ANT MONOCULTURE "whereas polyculture of several fungi could increase nutritional diversity and disease resistance of genetically variable gardens." An analog of artificial selection. https://lnkd.in/ew5j47P View in LinkedIn

THE GREY ZONE in biology includes prions, viruses and other creatures whose status as living things has been hotly debated. The truth is, it simply depends on what definition of life is adopted. Purely a philosophical issue, not terribly interesting in itself. But that Grey Zone is particularly interesting because it includes very unusual life forms. And these life forms have a surprising importance in thinking about Artificial Intelligence, our ultimate destination. View in LinkedIn

DNA DOGMA OF LIFE FORMS. "Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is a molecule that encodes the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms and many viruses. DNA is a nucleic acid; alongside proteins and carbohydrates, nucleic acids compose the three major macromolecules essential for all known forms of life." A definitional stricture. https://lnkd.in/ePfbUir View in LinkedIn

"DNA, RNA, CARBOHYDRATES AND PROTEINS are widely considered the four macromolecules absolutely essential for life as we know it. Without them "life would not exist." Another definitional trap. https://lnkd.in/ekR4TrT View in LinkedIn

NO DEFINITION. "There is still no agreed-upon definition of what we actually mean by that troublesome word “life,” let alone “synthetic life,” “artificial life,” or “life from scratch...we can define “synthetic life” as self-replicating biology based on a synthetic genome, a synthetic code-script." Synthetic life is now a new branch on the tree of life (Craig Venter). https://lnkd.in/eyZU783 View in LinkedIn