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INFORMATION TRANSFER. “There is a flow of information linking nest generations through the builders. Nests and burrows are adapted for the growth of burrow builders and nest-makers. Those interactors carry the information through which the nest is replicated. Bateson was right: sometimes, perhaps always, nests meet Dawkins’ definition of a replicator, and they meet ours too.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

DEFINITIONAL CHANGES. “What we see happening, then, is an attempt to preserve the interest in and momentum of holobiont and biofilm research by relinquishing the necessity of collective reproduction (and thus the status as ‘‘major transitions’’ in evolution in Maynard Smith’s and Szathmary’s sense).” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

NEW REPLICATOR. “In a recent review on the history of microbial ontology, one of us (Doolittle 2013) argued for considering interactions patterns more specifically as a kind of replicator.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

COMMUNITY ORGANISMS. “Ereshefsky and his colleagues have been especially active in promoting multi-species biofilms as organism-like evolutionary individuals, endorsing a relaxation of some traditional requirements for collective reproduction.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

FUNCTIONAL EVOLUTION. “We propose a similar perspective on the multilineage metabolic networks and other interaction patterns that are often instantiated by holobionts and other microbial consortia (Fig. 1). These are persistent functionally characterizable patterns that, despite being uncoupled from specific taxa, coherently exhibit relations of identity, and which change over evolutionary time.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

NEW THINKING. “In biofilm philosophizing there is also a move to see collectives as real and evolutionarily cohesive even though collective (vertical) reproduction can be supplemented (sometimes 100 %) by (horizontal) recruitment.” (The slime philosophers). https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

REGULATORY NETWORKS. “It is not clear where such entities would belong in any overtly materialist biological hierarchy (cells, organisms, species, etc.), whether they are outcomes of major transitions, or even whether any explanatory goal would be served by answering such questions. Nevertheless they are arguably recognizable songs, performed by a panoply of diverse genealogically embedded singers over the course of evolutionary history.” https://lnkd.in/dk3R9p6y View in LinkedIn

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