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PERSISTENT SYMBIONTS. "Neither humans, nor any other organism, can be regarded as individuals by anatomical criteria. To capture this complexity, the term “holobiont” has been introduced as the anatomical term that describes the integrated organism comprised of both host elements and persistent populations of symbionts." View in LinkedIn

"UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES and side effects are closely related to emergent properties." https://lnkd.in/dN5A7Kw https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence#CITEREFAnderson1972 View in LinkedIn

POSTER CHILD MOSAIC. "Mastotermes darwiniensis, a termite of northern Australia, may claim the title of “poster organism” for the chimeric individual. How can a worker termite be considered an individual when it is the hive that is the reproductive unit of the species, and the worker cannot even digest cellulose without its gut symbiont, Mixotricha paradoxa, which is itself a genetic composite of at least five other species?" View in LinkedIn

THE KEY ISSUE. "Predicting the behavior of complex decentralized pervasive computing systems before their deployment in a dynamic environment, as well as being able to influence and control their behavior in a decentralized way, will be of fundamental importance in the near future." https://lnkd.in/dMwveSp View in LinkedIn

MICROBIOME SYMBIONTS. "Metagenomic sequencing has shown that each human gut has entered into a persistent partnership with over 150 species of bacteria, and that the human species maintains about 1000 major bacteria groups in our gut microbiome. The gene set contained by this symbiotic metagenome is about 150 times larger than that of the human eukaryotic genome. And this does not include the symbionts of human airways, skin, mouth, or reproductive orifices." View in LinkedIn

GREATER THAN THE SUM OF THE PARTS. "Emergence is the fact that a structure, not explicitly represented at a lower level, appears at a higher level. In the case of dynamic self-organising systems, with decentralised control and local interactions, intimately linked with self-organisation is the notion of emergent properties." https://lnkd.in/dfAjwzM View in LinkedIn

GENE FATES AFTER DUPLICATION. "Following duplication, each gene within a paralogous pair may evolve in several ways. For example, it may retain the same set of functions as the ancestral copy, retain only a subset of the original set of functions (subfunctionalization), obtain a new function (neofunctionalization), or degrade into a nonfunctional gene (nonfunctionalization)." https://lnkd.in/eHCDVhZ View in LinkedIn

WHAT ABOUT VESTIGIAL GENETICS, hangovers from early gene exaptations and promiscuous gene sharing? How do these affect evolutionary potential? View in LinkedIn

EXAPTATION OF NON-CODING DNA. "We are left then with the evolutionary potential of excess eukaryotic DNA and its ability to be co-opted into function, which might well impart a different tempo and mode to eukaryotic evolution." http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/10278.full View in LinkedIn

EFFICIENCY IN SIMPLICITY. "In fact, because of their more rapid generation times and larger population sizes, we might expect prokaryotes to have more exquisitely refined regulatory systems, more selection per base pair as it were—a sort of historical complexity, alluded to above in our cyanobacteria vs. marsupial comparison." http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/10278.full View in LinkedIn