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RESISTANCE. “Perhaps unsurprisingly, there has been pushback from more conservative philosophers and microbiologists over what would justify claims that holobionts ought rightly to be called units of selection.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

ANALOGY. “Hologenomic evolution is most easily understood by equating a gene in the nuclear genome to a microbe in the microbiome... Evolution for both genes and symbionts is fundamentally a change in population frequency over successive generations, i.e., the fraction of holobionts carrying that particular nuclear allele or microbe.” (Bordenstein and Theis). https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

MIGHTY MICROBES. “We have known for many decades that major biogeochemical cycles in the ocean or on land are driven by microbes and that microbes affect animal, human, and plant health directly in many ways, not all negative.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

UNITS OF SELECTION. “Here, we argue that interaction patterns as entities do in fact vary, pass on traits to later instances of themselves, and differ in propensity to spread and persist; they thus act as units of selection.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

THE REFRAIN. “Put metaphorically, what matters is the song, not the singer. The song, to flesh out this metaphor, is the pattern of interactions (metabolic, structural, or developmental) between partner lineages (the singers).” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

FUNCTIONAL EVOLUTION. “So, if the idea that microbial consortia are units of selection is to be borne out, it might be better to focus on evolutionary processes at a functional level, not the taxonomic level of partner organisms and their lineages.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

COMMUNITY COEVOLUTION. “And pairwise, species-on-species coevolution involving a macrobe and hundreds or thousands of microbial lineages independently seems unlikely, if not impossible. There is no obvious mechanism by which the latter could evolve collectively (but see below as to how they might appear to do so).” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

HORIZONTAL GENE TRANSFER. “What primarily undermines this claim, that holobionts (or biofilms) as collectives might be units of selection, is the failure of the lineages they comprise to reproduce as collectives—to exhibit coordinated vertical inheritance.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

EXPERIMENTAL TEST. “A NASA satellite experiment is in process, to attempt to detect antimatter cosmic rays. This will be a suitable test of the STH, since the STH denies that any primordial antimatter survives on this side of the Big Bang.” (STH = Symmetrical Time Hypothesis). https://lnkd.in/gDaxUYAS View in LinkedIn

NOW THE FUN STARTS. “We can therefore predict that twice as many black holes will be found as would be expected under any non-STH theory. What happens when an antimatter black hole collides with a "normal" one, if anything?” (STH = Symmetrical Time Hypothesis). https://lnkd.in/gDaxUYAS View in LinkedIn