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PHYSICAL LIMITS. “The fact that the limitations that terrestrial extremophiles have reached – be it in terms of temperature, pressure, salinity, pH, or water activity – seem to be close to those capable of carbon-based life forms anywhere.” https://lnkd.in/euEN3Eh View in LinkedIn

“TRANSPOSASES hold a special place in the pantheon of genome sculptors. Arguably the products of the most abundant genes on Earth, transposases are transposon-encoded enzymes that cleave transposon ends and attach them to new sequences.” http://science.sciencemag.org/content/338/6108/758 View in LinkedIn

REACHING BIOLOGICAL LIMITS. “Can we make the case that life has already begun to reach the boundaries of the biological universe (however defined)?” https://lnkd.in/euEN3Eh View in LinkedIn

HOST-PARASITE COLLABORATION. “The traffic in genes and regulatory sequences is bidirectional: Transposons pick up bits and pieces of genes that code for proteins other than transposases, and transposase genes are pressed into services other than transposition.” http://science.sciencemag.org/content/338/6108/758 View in LinkedIn

COMMON VIEW. “The Darwinian mantra broadly holds that, other than the exigencies of the death of Solar Systems (and yet more distant catastrophes) evolution is both indeterminate and open-ended, with the widespread view that it is unpredictable and the implicit (albeit largely un-examined) assumption that there is no limit to its complexity.” https://lnkd.in/euEN3Eh View in LinkedIn

AT THE HEART OF GENE EVOLUTION. “Transposons contribute to creating genes, modifying them, and programming and reprogramming them. Many transposons and retroelements contain captured gene fragments and can be part of gene regulatory regions.” http://science.sciencemag.org/content/338/6108/758 View in LinkedIn

NO PLAN. “It is commonplace that evolution has no fore-knowledge.” https://lnkd.in/euEN3Eh View in LinkedIn

UNDERSTATEMENT. “We need to be careful not to under-estimate the complexity of some “primitive” organisms.” https://lnkd.in/euEN3Eh View in LinkedIn

END IN SIGHT. “These, in their various ways, indicate that however complex nervous systems may get, there are definite limits to what in the end is possible.” https://lnkd.in/euEN3Eh View in LinkedIn

BRAIN LIMITS. “But of all the limits to complexity perhaps the most interesting is the one that concerns the evolution of nervous systems. It is well known that in terms of metabolic energy nervous systems are cripplingly expensive: the retina of the blow-fly alone accounts for an extraordinary 8% of the total energy budget of the insect.” https://lnkd.in/euEN3Eh View in LinkedIn