Category: Uncategorized

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE continues from last weekend and concludes this weekend on a lively article about metabolic cycles as functional units of selection in microorganisms, not species as the unit. This radical, imaginative suggestion is potentially a paradigm breaker. https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

NETWORKS AS FUNCTIONAL GROUPS. “Regulatory networks of this type are in a sense patterns only, functionally characterized relationships that can be said to bear at least minimal relations of ancestry and descent.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

NETWORKS NOT GENES. “Wagner argues that ‘‘it is the historical continuity of gene regulatory networks rather than the expression of individual homologous genes that underlies the homology of morphological characters’’.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

SONG VS SINGER. “So, how might we imagine that it is the song (the collective metabolic and other interaction patterns that support putative holobionts) and not the singers (the sometimes variable and horizontally acquired organismal lineages that carry them out) that is primarily of evolutionary interest in holobionts and biofilms?” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

A cross section of wood tells a unique history of development frozen in time, patterns inscrutible to us of small victories and Hurculean striggles. View in LinkedIn

“TIME has independent ultimate significance; it is of more majesty and more provocative of awe than even a sky studded with stars. Gliding gently in the most ancient of all splendors, it tells so much more than space can say in its broken language of things, playing symphonies upon instruments of isolated beings, unlocking the earth and making it happen.” (Abraham Joshua Heschel). https://lnkd.in/d4gKekD8 View in LinkedIn

FUNCTIONAL SELECTION. “For something like the human gut microbiome, where the maternally inherited microbiome (in vaginal birth) is replaced early in childhood, the fact that adult microbiomes bear even a loose similarity to each other must be due to similar patterns of recruitment and/or maintenance based on gene function, not on taxonomy per se.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

FUNCTIONAL CLASSIFICATIONS. “These authors suggest that an appropriately ecological microbial classification would recognize functional ‘‘guilds,’’ phylogenetically heterogeneous groups defined only by their possession of one or more biochemical capacities.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

FUNCTIONAL COMMUNITIES. “Functional metabolic processes uncoupled from taxonomy (at least at a fine scale) are found not only in microbiomes inside the intestines of macrobes (holobionts) but also in microbial communities in decaying dead whales at the bottom of the sea, on our teeth, comprising plant mycorrhizae, and at a host of other natural and human-made sites.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

THE REFRAIN. “The players may change but the game remains’’—expresses exactly the same sentiment we articulate as ‘‘It’s the song, not the singer(s)’’ in the ideas presented here.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn