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A MUST READ: this is a superb, lucid and informative article with stunning graphics on the meaning of infectivity rates in different viral diseases. Rarely is it so well articulated. https://lnkd.in/deDFGUR View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this one weekend sojourn into linked selection and demography as a window into what some modern ecologists are thinking about; Darwin’s theory of evolution is hereby combined with molecular genetics, and the mechanisms and consequences of natural selection are explored. Considering that the modern concept of the gene did not exist in Darwin’s day, this footnoting of his theory is all the more extraordinary. View in LinkedIn

ADDITIONAL FACTOR. “To further complicate the issue, demographic effects can act to enhance or counter the effects of linked selection.” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mec.14167/full View in LinkedIn

DISCONNECT. “In species with long-term conserved broad-scale recombination landscapes, such as birds, the replication of accentuated differentiation may therefore not be informative regarding a genomic region's involvement in adaptation or speciation, nor indicative of parallel ecology-related evolution.” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mec.14167/full View in LinkedIn

DIVERSITY LANDSCAPE. “The extended periods of time across which this process is active have two notable implications: the slow process of background selection alone might suffice for the evolution of correlated differentiation landscapes, and sweeps in the ancestral (as opposed to extant) lineage may make contributions to extant genomic landscapes of diversity and differentiation.” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mec.14167/full View in LinkedIn

"THE HUMAN CONNECTOME PROJECT consortium led by Washington University, University of Minnesota, and Oxford University is undertaking a systematic effort to map macroscopic human brain circuits and their relationship to behavior in a large population of healthy adults." https://lnkd.in/ddAE8pR View in LinkedIn

BRAIN WIRING. "Characterizing the detailed point-to-point connectivity of the brain is increasingly recognized as a key objective for neuroscience. Many even think that without knowing the ‘connectome’ – the brain’s wiring diagram – we will never understand how its electrochemical alchemy gives rise to our thoughts, actions, perceptions, beliefs, and ultimately to our consciousness." https://lnkd.in/dN2munW View in LinkedIn

In the forest View in LinkedIn

IMMENSE CHALLENGE BY THE NUMBERS. "The human brain, it is often said, is the most complex object in the known universe. Counting all the connections among its roughly 90 billion neurons, at the rate of one each second, would take about 3 million years – and just counting these connections says nothing about their intricate patterns of connectivity." (And see where this great machine has got humanity!) https://lnkd.in/dN2munW View in LinkedIn

MEANINGLESS NEGATIVITY. It has often been said that all this nonsense about brain uploading is not possible until we understand the human brain. But there are innumerable examples of capturing phenomena without any clue of how, and the brain-to-brain experiments are stellar examples. Not a clue how this works, no mechanism under consideration or test. View in LinkedIn