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TERRESTRIAL VS AERIAL. "This trend is primarily the result of body-size changes in large flying insects, such as dragonflies (but also in grasshoppers), and ground-dwelling groups, such as many beetles or cockroaches, may not follow the same pattern because the history of terrestrial predation differs from that of aerial predation." https://lnkd.in/dEANyiE View in LinkedIn

SMALL AND NIMBLE. "Maneuverability plays a key role in aerial predation and predator evasion, and scales inversely with body size in flying insects, suggesting that size-selective predation pressure by flying birds is a plausible explanation for the weakening and ultimate decoupling of the size-oxygen relationship." https://lnkd.in/dEANyiE View in LinkedIn

EMERGENCE OF BIRDS. "Maximum wing length closely tracked atmospheric pO2 before 140 Ma, but became decoupled from pO2 trends and is better explained by a model of stasis after 130 Ma. The timing of the oxygen-size decoupling coincides with the Early Cretaceous diversification of birds, between their first appearance in the latest Jurassic (Archaeopteryx, ca. 150 Ma) and the presence of diverse assemblages 25 Myr later." https://lnkd.in/dEANyiE View in LinkedIn

AREA TO VOLUME LIMITATIONS. "Flying insects should be particularly susceptible to variations in atmospheric pO2 because their flight musculature has high energy demands, particularly during periods of active flight. The volume occupied by tracheae, tubes that transport oxygen throughout the body, scales hypermetrically with body volume, imposing further surface area-to-volume constraints on maximum size." https://lnkd.in/dEANyiE View in LinkedIn

THE TRANSITION. "We want to understand how the nonliving materials, if you put them together in an appropriate manner, suddenly can become living. It has to do with understanding how matter organizes in a different way." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

UNCOUPLING AND INCREASED INTERACTIONS. "A further decrease in maximum size during the Cenozoic may relate to the evolution of bats, the Cretaceous mass extinction, or further specialization of flying birds. The decoupling of insect size and atmospheric pO2 coincident with the radiation of birds suggests that biotic interactions, such as predation and competition, superseded oxygen as the most important constraint on maximum body size of the largest insects." https://lnkd.in/dEANyiE View in LinkedIn

STEPS BACK. "If you want to create life more simplistically than modern life is doing it, you can't use the sophisticated solutions modern life has evolved. It means you end up constructing your own building blocks. You have to build systems that are based on much simpler components. You actually need to have some of these components to carry more than one functionality." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

RELATIONSHIP OF SIZE AND O2. "The data are best explained by a model relating maximum size to atmospheric environmental oxygen concentration (pO2) until the end of the Jurassic, and then at constant sizes, independent of oxygen fluctuations, during the Cretaceous and, at a smaller size, the Cenozoic. Maximum insect size decreased even as atmospheric pO2 rose in the Early Cretaceous following the evolution and radiation of early birds, particularly as birds acquired adaptations that allowed more agile flight." https://lnkd.in/dEANyiE View in LinkedIn

ANY MATERIALS. "In principle, you could build living systems out of robotics parts. Life is a much more general process than what we see in modern biology. You can have living processes carried by robotic systems, by computational systems and by mixtures of biological, robotics and computational systems." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

HYPEROXYGENATED PERIOD. "Because metabolic oxygen demand increases with increasing body size, environmental oxygen concentration (pO2) is frequently invoked as an important constraint on the size of animals. Giant late Paleozoic insects, with wingspans as large as 70 cm, are the iconic example of the oxygen-body size link; hyperoxic conditions during the Carboniferous and Permian are thought to have permitted the spectacular sizes of the largest insects ever." https://lnkd.in/dEANyiE View in LinkedIn