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REMARKABLE TWIST. "We demonstrate that unreduced gametes combining freely among parents of different ploidy are the core driver of such systems and that the survival of individual gametic combinations drives reproductive isolation." https://lnkd.in/eJvn-m7 View in LinkedIn

HYBRID ADVANTAGES. “This is another way of stating, in informational terms, that analogue-only systems are not as versatile or as robust as analogue systems with digital information control and as such may probably have very limited evolutionary capacity.” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn

REPRODUCTIVE ISOLATION. "One of the key modes of plant speciation is polyploidy (duplication of all chromosomes), which can lead to sympatric speciation because it is often associated with limited gene flow and reproductive isolation." https://lnkd.in/eJvn-m7 View in LinkedIn

AUTOPOLYPLOID. "Definition of autopolyploid: an individual or strain whose chromosome complement consists of more than two complete copies of the genome of a single ancestral species." https://lnkd.in/ewCPSzA View in LinkedIn

VAST NUMBER OF POLYPLOID SPECIES. "Our survey found that 53.2% of polyploid taxa were unnamed and that c. 24% of all plant taxa were polyploids. Assuming these numbers are representative for angiosperms, we estimate that there may be an additional c. 51 000–61 000 cryptic polyploid species." https://lnkd.in/eee56_B View in LinkedIn

POLYPLOIDY PLANTS. "How many unnamed polyploid flowering plant species exist in nature? Current estimates suggest there are c. 350 000 named flowering plant species with another 10–20% to be named in general." https://lnkd.in/eee56_B View in LinkedIn

MEIOTIC MISHAP. "Environmental stress often triggers unreduced gamete production, suggesting that unreduced gametes may facilitate polyploid speciation in response to changing environments. Thus, although unreduced gamete formation may be a meiotic mishap, we suggest that unreduced gametes can be more explicitly considered as a mechanism for evolutionary speciation that should be measured and tested across and within lineages for exaptive evolution (a feature with evolutionary utility that has not arisen under conventional selective pressure) and evolvability (the capacity to generate adaptive genetic variation)." http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168952514001590 View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this brief venture into the evolution of biological information, which is at the core of life itself. Among its quandaries, and for another time, are the issues around prions and viruses. They contain biological information, but many scientists consider them non-living despite being able to replicate and to evolve. There is always more to learn. View in LinkedIn

ORIGIN OF LIFE. “The emergence of life was probably marked by a transition in information processing capabilities.” http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869 View in LinkedIn

DIGITAL TRANSITION. “Purely analogue life forms could have existed in the past but are not likely to survive over geological timescales without acquiring explicitly digitized informational protocols. Therefore, life forms that ‘go digital’ may be the only systems that survive in the long-run and are thus the only remaining product of the processes that led to life.” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn