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INCIDENTAL IMPRINT? "While the density of annual rings on a cross-cut of a branch may provide a dendrologist insight into long-term climatic development, it is highly improbable that this information is accessible to the tree itself. Such “stored information” may be a mere imprint of incidents and accidents of the past, without any informative value for those involved." https://lnkd.in/dfsCv77 View in LinkedIn

DATA ACCESS. "Plants store a wealth of data about their history in the structure of their bodies. Given the permanent character of cell walls, every branch and twig holds information about the past. However, this by no means guarantees that the plant cares—or that it is at least capable of accessing these data." https://lnkd.in/dfsCv77 View in LinkedIn

Afternoon tea just waiting for you. View in LinkedIn

DERIVED TRAIT. “If so, then the original form of sexual reproduction may have been unisexual, onto which sexes were superimposed as a later feature. In this model, unisexual reproduction is both an ancestral and a derived trait.” https://lnkd.in/dn4azG7 View in LinkedIn

DERIVED NOT ANCESTRAL. “That a myriad of different types of sex determination and sex determinants abound in animals, plants, protists, and fungi suggests that sex specification itself may not be ancestral and instead may be a derived trait.” https://lnkd.in/dn4azG7 View in LinkedIn

OUR ORIGINS. “No one knows the exact nature of the LECA, but we think that this ancestor was a unicellular, aquatic, motile creature with one or two flagella. Thus, in some respects the LECA was simple.” (LECA = last eukaryotic common ancestor). https://lnkd.in/dn4azG7 View in LinkedIn

DIVERSE PROCESSES. “On the other hand, the vast evolutionary distance that separates any given extant species from the LECA necessarily implies that other features of sex will be derived.” (LECA = last eukaryotic common ancestor). https://lnkd.in/dn4azG7 View in LinkedIn

INBREEDING CONSEQUENCES. “And in humans there are the examples of consanguineous marriages, resulting for example from cousin–cousin pairings, which lead to considerable inbreeding with the risk of exposure of recessive alleles in a homozygous configuration.” https://lnkd.in/dn4azG7 View in LinkedIn

COMMON FEATURES. “Given the antiquity of sex, there are features of sexual reproduction that are ancient and ancestral, and thus shared in diverse extant organisms.” https://lnkd.in/dn4azG7 View in LinkedIn

CORE MECHANISMS AND MODES. “Beyond the commonalities in the mechanisms of sex, there are also shared features to the modes of sexual reproduction. This includes outbreeding between genetically divergent members of the population, but also types of inbreeding that can involve the ability of the yeast S. cerevisiae to undergo mating type switching that allows mother cells to mate with their daughter cells.” https://lnkd.in/dn4azG7 View in LinkedIn