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How the world got fat: a visualisation of global obesity over 40 years https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2017/jan/03/using-data-visualisations-to-help-explain-the-global-obesity-explosion?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other View in LinkedIn

MAJOR TRANSITIONS. "The major evolutionary transitions in the history of life on Earth include the transition from non-coded to coded information (the origin of the genetic code), the transition from prokaryotes to eukaryotes, the transition from protists to multicellular organisms, and the transition from primate groups to linguistic communities." https://lnkd.in/dTS7dFy View in LinkedIn

DRIVING FORCE OF TRANSITIONS. "Here we propose that a transition from bottom-up to top-down causation – mediated by a reversal in the flow of information from lower to higher levels of organization, to that from higher to lower levels of organization – is a driving force for most major evolutionary transitions." https://lnkd.in/dTS7dFy View in LinkedIn

"TOP-DOWN CAUSATION has been suggested to occur at all scales of biological organization as a mechanism for explaining the hierarchy of structure and causation in living systems." https://lnkd.in/dTS7dFy View in LinkedIn

OPEN QUESTION. "Both of these factors facilitate the transition to multicellular-level selection and the subsequent evolution of multicellular complexity. Little, however, is known about the origin of the single-cell bottleneck in extant taxa." https://lnkd.in/dU8HRX5 View in LinkedIn

COMMONALITY ENSURED. "Unicellular bottlenecks are present in distantly related multicellular lineages, and appear to be a critical step in the evolution of multicellular complexity. The unicellular bottleneck limits genetic diversity, and hence genetic conflict, among the cells of extant multicellular organisms, and ensures that all cells constituting a multicellular individual share a common developmental history and environment." https://lnkd.in/dU8HRX5 View in LinkedIn

HYPOTHESIS. "More broadly, our finding that simple multicellularity can evolve in less than a year in both Chlamydomonas and Saccharomyces suggests that genetic barriers (for example, few mutational paths to multicellularity) may be less restrictive than ecological barriers, namely a lack of persistent selective advantages for cellular clusters." https://lnkd.in/dU8HRX5 View in LinkedIn

NECESSARY BUT NOT SUFFICIENT. "Although epigenetic regulation was likely a necessary precondition for the emergence of multicellular organization (at least in extant lineages), it does not necessitate that such a transition from unicellularity to multicellularity will occur or explain how it occurs." https://lnkd.in/dTS7dFy View in LinkedIn

CO-OPTION. "These results demonstrate that the unicellular bottleneck, a trait essential for evolving multicellular complexity, can arise rapidly via co-option of the ancestral unicellular form." https://lnkd.in/dU8HRX5 View in LinkedIn

MANY FROM THE FEW. "Importantly, this innovation was crucial to the later emergence of multicellularity by permitting differentiation of many cell types from a single genomic inventory." https://lnkd.in/dTS7dFy View in LinkedIn