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SO ENDS this small collection of observations on spider webs. The focused human mind, armed with specific testable hypotheses and open curiosity, has the capacity to pierce the veil of nature. The craft of deep and careful systematic observation was exemplified by Darwin, who collected facts on a wholesale basis, both great and small, as a pointalistic collage of the nature of nature. Here, the humble spider is a Solomon among insects, an example of the remarkable depth of our natural world. https://lnkd.in/dnpWmev View in LinkedIn

ENERGY BOOST. "By transferring most genes other than those needed for rapidly responsive respiration to the nucleus and amplifying those few many times over (many mitochondrial genomes per organelle and many organelles per cell), eukaryotes have vastly increased the average energy available per gene expressed, protein synthesis being the cell’s greatest expense." http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/10278.full View in LinkedIn

ALTERNATIVE SPLICING "is widely held to be an answer to the riddle of how humans can be (supposedly) more evolutionarily “advanced” than nematodes or fruit flies, say, while boasting hardly any more genes." Chew on that one. http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/10278.full View in LinkedIn

INTRONS REFRESH. "By permitting the reassortment of exonic information, they facilitate both the production of multiple and possibly differently functional proteins from a single gene (“alternative splicing”) and the evolution of novel genes by recombination of exons from different genes (“exon shuffling”)." http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/10278.full View in LinkedIn

INTRONS AND THE KEY TO EVOLUTION. "Spliceosomal introns might well be one of the genomic feature that eukaryotes must put up with because of small population sizes. When these genic interruptions (found in all eukaryotes but, as yet, not in prokaryotes) were first discovered, Gilbert ventured that their presence held the key to the enhanced evolutionary potential of eukaryotes." http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/10278.full View in LinkedIn

THE SCENARIO, UNFOLDED. "Once on the scene, eukaryotes are imagined to have radically altered evolution’s tempo and mode. With cells structurally more complex—but at the same time, more self-similar at the cellular level—than their prokaryotic ancestors, eukaryotes radiated into a great diversity of organismal types, including complex multicellular forms with the transcendent potential to “bear embryos, respond to music, and reflect on their own nature” http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/10278.full View in LinkedIn

NOT UNIQUE. "We suggest that there is no fundamental difference in kind between these various symbiotic alliances, just different evolutionary histories. Eukaryotes do not pose unique challenges to and do not require special treatment within evolutionary theory." http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/10278.full View in LinkedIn

UNLIKELY MULTIPLICITY. "In any event, the probability that two or three origins of multicellularity simply arose by chance within eukaryotes as opposed to prokaryotes is somewhere on the order of 1/4–1/2, well below the general standards of statistical validity." http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/10278.full View in LinkedIn

SINGLE EVENT. "Complex multicellularity has only arisen twice, once in animals and once in vascular plants. One might add fungi to the list, although the number of fungal cell types is not large, and there is some question as to whether multicellularity was ancestral to the phylogenetic group that contains animals, fungi, and slime molds." http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/10278.full View in LinkedIn

INGENIOUS. "The real strength of the web is not the silk but how its mechanical properties change as loads strain it, which is a very ingenious inbuilt feature which could be used in many areas of life to contain damage to a small area...The silk itself has an ability to soften or stiffen to withstand different types of loads - unlike any other natural or man-made fibres." https://lnkd.in/dYdY4x3 View in LinkedIn