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LYNN MARGULIS won fame and notoriety for her evolutionary theory of engulfment leading to the formation of the mitochondria and chloroplast. "Margulis transformed and fundamentally framed current understanding of the evolution of cells with nuclei – an event Ernst Mayr called "perhaps the most important and dramatic event in the history of life" – by proposing it to have been the result of symbiotic mergers of bacteria." (Bacteria of different species, hybrids). https://lnkd.in/et3gdfj View in LinkedIn

TORNARÍA LARVAE, a video of these other-worldly little creatures that could as easily be from Mars. They are the daily companions of marine biologists like Doc in Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. https://lnkd.in/d-k_UHZ View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE is a curious story, wherein an old fashioned marine biologist, Donald Williamson, presents rather radical ideas that his peers vilify, hang draw and quarter. Williamson obtained the support of Lynn Margulis for a theory that rather closely resembles her own (endosymbiosis) that was equally vilified before going prime time. This story is less about the veracity of Williamson's theory than about how much scientists hate change. https://lnkd.in/d-vV-rd View in LinkedIn

THE FLAW. "By the late l960's it became apparent to us and others that Carrel's claim to have cultured chick fibroblast cells for 34 years was spurious. It had to be assumed that Carrel's chick cultures consisted of normal cells because no one has ever reported a spontaneously arising transformed chicken cell strain free of oncogenic viruses. Several reports of alleged immortal chick cell lines have appeared, but all have been associated with oncogenic viruses, chemical carcinogens or radiation." http://protein.bio.msu.ru/biokhimiya/contents/v62/full/62111380.html View in LinkedIn

MYTH SUPPORTED. "In the years that followed Carrel's observations, support for the interpretation of his experiments seemed to emerge from several laboratories where it was observed that cell populations from other species, including humans, also seemed to have the striking ability to replicate apparently indefinitely." http://protein.bio.msu.ru/biokhimiya/contents/v62/full/62111380.html View in LinkedIn

CHIMERIC LARVAE: "each presenting different combinations of maternal genotypic constituents, create genetically-complex sets of asexual propagules. This novel mode of inheritance in corals challenges classical postulations of sexual/asexual reproduction traits, as asexual derived chimeric larvae represent an alliance between genotypes that significantly sways the recruits’ absolute fitness.” https://lnkd.in/d68A9uu View in LinkedIn

DOC RICKETTS IN CANNERY ROW. (John Steinbeck). "Doc is also the smartest man in Cannery Row, interested in knowing something about everything. "Doc would listen to any kind of nonsense and change it for you to a kind of wisdom. His mind had no horizon," Steinbeck wrote. "Everyone who knew him was indebted to him. And everyone who thought of him thought next, 'I really must do something nice for Doc.' https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannery_Row_(novel) View in LinkedIn

CHIMERIC CORAL LARVAE. " The globally distributed coral species Pocillopora damicornis is known to release either sexual or asexual derived planula-larvae in various reef locations...we documented the release of asexually derived chimeric larvae, originating from mosaicked maternal colonies that were also chimeras.” https://lnkd.in/d68A9uu View in LinkedIn

"INHERITED CHIMERISM is an alternative to the problematic practice of conjuring up additional, gene-donating symbionts at organelle origins to explain gene trees. It places no constraints on the collections of genes that the plastid and the mitochondrial symbionts possessed, other than that it needs to be a genome-sized collection, not tens of thousands of genes, and it allows freely for lateral gene transfer among prokaryotes before the endosymbionts become organelles and afterward. Lateral gene transfers among prokaryotes has received much attention in the past decades. Inherited chimerism incorporates lateral gene transfers among prokaryotes into endosymbiotic theory." https://lnkd.in/d4YBVjh View in LinkedIn

HYBRID PHOBIA. "The view that hybridisation threatens the genetic purity of parental species and is a violation of species integrity is pervasive throughout conservation literature. Furthermore, hybridisation is often considered to be an evolutionary dead end because genetic incompatibilities and combinations make hybrids unfit, sterile or absent." https://lnkd.in/dfcW_XQ View in LinkedIn