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RELATIVE GROWTH. "When a limiting resource is shared among several body parts, the degree to which it is used by one part diminishes its availability to another. Such a resource could then constitute a signaling mechanism that controls the relative growth of body parts." http://www.pnas.org/content/95/7/3685.full View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE deals with the issue of competition for resources between cells and organs of the same organism, and how resources are allocated between competing interests. This perspective of multicellular creatures being a community of cells turns our world view upside down, but at the same time makes perfect sense. It is the microcosm of natural selection and the survival of the fittest, with the overlay of the priority for the survival of the organism as a surrogate for the survival of the population. View in LinkedIn

TRAIT ALLOCATION. "Competition among body parts in the development and evolution of insect morphology. We show in two very different systems, butterfly wings and beetle horns, that experimentally induced changes in the allocation of developmental resources to one trait produces compensatory changes in the relative sizes of other traits." https://lnkd.in/dk8W49b View in LinkedIn

EU member states to vote on near-total neonicotinoids ban http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-43910536 View in LinkedIn

SELECTION OF THE FITTEST. "We argue that competition between genetically identical cells could improve the fitness of a multicellular organism by directing fitter cells to the germ line or by eliminating unfit cells, and that cell-competition mechanisms have been conserved in multicellular organisms. We propose that competition between genetically identical or highly similar units could have similar selective advantages at higher organizational levels, such as societies." https://lnkd.in/dXdwAzF View in LinkedIn

MIXED MODES. "Most of these models found that there was an advantage for a low frequency of sexual reproduction over complete asexuality. Very few models exist explaining the evolution and maintenance of obligate sexuality in comparison with facultative sex. In fact, according to most models, organisms that engage in sexual reproduction only part of the time seem to have the best of both worlds." https://lnkd.in/es2qrc5 View in LinkedIn

SEX VS ASEXUALITY. "Many models explaining the advantage of sexual reproduction over asexuality have been proposed, including the purging of deleterious mutations, adaptation, host–parasite co-evolution, random genetic drift, and pluralistic models combining some or all of the above." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ece3.1516/full View in LinkedIn

COMBINED ADVANTAGES. "In general, sex seems to allow superior responses to rapid challenges, both internal and external. Indeed, there is no consensus on a single major advantage for sex, and prevailing opinion is shifting toward a combination of advantages. That sex creates genetic variation, repairs DNA breaks, restores methylation patterns, and prevents accumulation of disadvantageous mutations is well accepted." https://lnkd.in/deZ8DED View in LinkedIn

"THE BENEFITS of eukaryotic meiotic sex are mostly discussed under the headings good, bad, and ugly: good, it generates genetic diversity in which rapid new combinations bring together beneficial mutations; bad, it purges the slow accumulation of slightly harmful mutations, i.e., it counters Muller’s ratchet; ugly, it is necessary for the arms race with rapidly changing parasites, the well-known Red Queen hypothesis." https://lnkd.in/deZ8DED View in LinkedIn

BASIC DOGMAS. "For more than a century the basic tenets for the advantages of sexual reproduction have been that it can serve to (i) generate progeny with a diversity of novel genotypes and (ii) purge the genome of deleterious mutations, such as transposable elements, which otherwise would accumulate inexorably via Muller’s Ratchet to degrade the integrity of the genome." http://www.mycologia.org/content/105/1/1.full View in LinkedIn