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CLOUDS. Every time I fly, I am impressed by the cloudscapes, and their orderly forms composed of disorderly vapor molecules. It is a grand self-assembly of innate materials, following some rigid physical laws. Given that weather systems are infinitely chaotic on one level, why do we have only ~100 cloud types? https://lnkd.in/dxRTsaW View in LinkedIn

A NEW SECTION STARTS on the subject of the biology and ecology of clouds. This layer of planet Earth is just a fluffy blanket, and for centuries we considered it to be as sterile as mother’s milk, but both assumptions turned out wrong. Life ‘will find a way’, is a famous quote from Jurassic Park. We have only just started to scratch the surface of microbial life, which seems to have no limits for its habitats. The door is opening in surprising ways. View in LinkedIn

An excellent tree gall — think wasps, eggs, growth hormone injections. View in LinkedIn

Iron veins in local stone. View in LinkedIn

SPECIES AS INDIVIDUALS. “Michael Ghiselin (1974) and David Hull (1976, 1978) advanced the thesis that species are not kinds but individuals. Although the species-as-individuals view has become widely accepted, it continues to encounter some resistance on the grounds that it is puzzling and counterintuitive. It is objected for example that, as the members of a species are discrete and relatively independent, it is not clear how they can be identified as parts of an individual.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

THE SPECIES THORN. “One of the earliest debates in modern philosophy of biology concerned the metaphysical status of species.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

ORGANISMS AS DEVELOPMENTAL CYCLES. “In fact, this is the view of evolution that developmental systems theorists have been advocating for many years, with the vital corollary that evolution can be driven by changes to any of the factors that contribute to reproducing the developmental cycle.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

PROCESS EVOLUTION. “While it is self-evident that evolution is a process, it is less clear how we should think about the nature of the entities that participate in this process. The traditional substantialist stance has been to regard them as things. Process ontology, of course, leads us to understand them as processes. If organisms are developmental cycles, then we should regard these developmental cycles, rather than the thing-like time slices that we abstract from them, as the actual entities that compose the evolutionary process.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

LOW FIDELITY. “Because these epigenetic inheritance systems typically depend on chemical diffusion and molecular transport processes, they exhibit far lower degrees of fidelity than the nucleic acid coding mechanism characteristic of genetic replication.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

THE NEW INHERITANCE. “In the end, a process ontology forces us to expand our understanding of inheritance itself. Recognizing the material overlap between parent and offspring in reproduction makes it obvious that what gets transmitted is much more than just the DNA. The material (i.e. cytoplasmic) continuum that exists between parent and offspring includes many molecular systems that can be inherited apart from the genome, such as macromolecular steady states and self-sustaining metabolic loops.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn