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COMPARATIVE ANATOMY. “Recent investigations into mimetic musculature across a broad phylogenetic range of primates have revealed a more complex picture of mimetic musculature morphology than previously thought.” https://lnkd.in/di-WAXE View in LinkedIn

SOCIAL FUNCTIONS. “Facial displays are generated by mimetic musculature. These displays help regulate and maintain social bonds and organization by cueing individuals to the emotional and behavioral intentions of the sender.” https://lnkd.in/di-WAXE View in LinkedIn

EMOTION SIGNALS. “The evolution of trichromatic vision and high visual acuity within Old World primates have been partially linked to their extensive and frequent use of visual communication including facial displays.” https://lnkd.in/di-WAXE View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE concludes this weekend on the anatomic drivers of the exquisitely nuanced human face. The human face is a derived mask, a derivative from our animal lineage, as shown by comparative anatomy. It has also derivative functions, from orifice control (eyes, nose, mouth). This patchwork of adaptations from other functions and other creatures is what makes the Mona Lisa smile. View in LinkedIn

FALSE TREES. “Rampant horizontal gene flow among prokaryotes falsifies the tenet that the evolutionary history of all organisms—and their genes—can be reflected unambiguously by a single, tree-like pattern. It is important to remember that Pace’s universal tree is a tree of small subunit rRNA genes, not a tree of life.” https://lnkd.in/ewnQ9Vg View in LinkedIn

NO INDIVIDUAL, NO TREE. “As fundamental units of evolution, individual organisms are held to be evolutionarily related within species and higher clades that, in turn, compose a single-rooted tree of life. But genomics, particularly the metagenomics of biological dark matter, reveals these truths to be, again, useful approximations restricted to the multi-cellular eukaryote realm. In fact, just as there are no “completely objective” individuals, there is no one true tree of all of life on Earth.” https://lnkd.in/ewnQ9Vg View in LinkedIn

VANISHING INDIVIDUAL. “It is no longer possible to claim that individual organisms are objectively real, fundamental units in nature. Instead, we must now recognize that the classical concept of “individual” is, at best, a reductionist abstraction, in the way “assume a spherical cow” is useful in biophysics—it simplifies the analysis, but at some cost to a correspondence with reality.” https://lnkd.in/ewnQ9Vg View in LinkedIn

HYBRID ORGANISMS. “Some have asserted the conceptual demise of the individual with the suggestion that, “We are all lichens now”.” (Lichens are part algae, part fungus). https://lnkd.in/ewnQ9Vg View in LinkedIn

DOMINANT POPULATIONS. “From a biodiversity perspective this means that, in principle, a rare prokaryotic species (say, 0.1 % of the population) could become the dominant species (say, 90 % of the population) in a very short period of time. Some recent reports suggest that this does in fact occur in natural populations.” https://standardsingenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40793-016-0180-8 View in LinkedIn

PRIMED FOR SPEED. “Mimetic muscle physiology is also derived in humans relative to other primates. It has long been known that human mimetic muscles are dominated by fast-twitch (type II) myosin fibers.” https://lnkd.in/di-WAXE View in LinkedIn