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DEEPLY ENTANGLED. "Vestigial attributes such as pharyngeal pouches reflect the intertwined nature of phylogenetic and ontogenetic transformations that are impossible to disentangle." https://evolution-outreach.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-014-0012-5 View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this (coincidental?) linking of Morning Glories from the Edo Period in Japan with the emergence of tulip mania in Europe, linked by the Dutch East India Company. Both were prized for extraordinary flower variants, the first caused by transposons, and the second by a virus. What a luxury to be dedicated to rare flowers, oblivious of a world turned topsy-turvy by megalomaniacs and madness. View in LinkedIn

STREAK VIRUS. "Black flower color of dahlia (Dahlia variabilis). We report that the purple color is not caused by a mutation, as previously thought, but by infection with tobacco streak virus. Tobacco streak virus suppressed post-transcriptional gene silencing and caused a flower color change in black dahlias, which supported the role of cyanidin-based anthocyanins for black flower appearance." https://lnkd.in/dSXuMUE View in LinkedIn

VIRAL ERADICATION. "The bulb industry views the destruction of the mosaic virus as one of its proudest achievements, and with good reason. It is the florists’ equivalent of the elimination of smallpox. Yet it can hardly be denied that something has been lost in the winning of this war. The infinite variety that each broken tulip could display is gone, and with it much of the flower’s capacity to fascinate and astound." https://lnkd.in/dkNDdDY View in LinkedIn

ISSUE OF INHERITANCE. "Crucial difference, however, is that whereas scars and other traces of injury (e.g., from regenerated limbs) remain a part of that organism, they are not passed along to the next generation, and in that essential sense they do not conform to a fundamental tenet of vestigiality as commonly understood." https://evolution-outreach.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-014-0012-5 View in LinkedIn

VIRAL PURGING. "Breeders today are trying to make Semper Augustus again. Surprising all of the former tulips have gone extinct and recently breeders eliminate tulips whenever they suspect some viruses to be present." https://lnkd.in/dqpDyTS View in LinkedIn

UNINTENDED. "Emergence is the phenomenon wherein a system is designed according to certain principles, but interesting properties arise that are not included in the goals of the designer." http://consc.net/notes/emergence.html View in LinkedIn

SIMPLE COMPLEXITY. "Emergence is the phenomenon wherein complex, interesting high-level function is produced as a result of combining simple low-level mechanisms in simple ways." http://consc.net/notes/emergence.html View in LinkedIn

ENERGY, PHENOTYPE AND EMERGENCE. "In such natural processes, everything depends on everything else, and phenotypes are emergent properties of their systems." https://lnkd.in/dJdiNmR View in LinkedIn

EMERGENT PHENOMENA. "The crowning source of complication is that processes at all these different scales interact with one another: These multi-scale interactions produce emergent phenomena, including life and consciousness.” http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2011/10/robot-biologist/ View in LinkedIn