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CLONAL MONOCULTURE. "Leafcutter ants depend on the cultivation of symbiotic Attamyces fungi for food, which are thought to be grown by the ants in single-strain, clonal monoculture... Monoculture eliminates cultivar-cultivar competition that would select for competitive fungal traits that are detrimental to the ants." View in LinkedIn

THE GREY ZONE. The first Grey Zone characters are prions, a "quasi-species". These things are very perplexing. They are just misfolded normal cellular proteins ( chains of amino acids) that have the ability to mutate and evolve. They are infectious proteins that can induce normal proteins to become infectious by adopting their misfolded shape, and thus are self-propagating. Curious, to say the least. A serious head-job. View in LinkedIn

GENETIC SELECTION. "Rather than growing a single cultivar solely for nutrition, insect farmers appear to cultivate, and possibly "artificially select" for, integrated crop-microbe consortia. Indeed, crop domestication in the context of coevolving and codomesticated microbial consortia may explain the 50-million year old agricultural success of insect farmers." http://www.jstor.org/stable/30033817 View in LinkedIn

DNA CHAUVANISM. Stanley Miller, Carl Sagan and 18 notable other scientists debate the origin of life. A remarkable dialogue. https://lnkd.in/e6N687q View in LinkedIn

CLONAL SELECTION BY ANTS. "The filamentous fungi cultivated by leafcutter ants are highly polyploid, and correlates with a massive expansion of these ant colonies ~20 million years ago. It is believed that these were clonally selected for higher productivity by the ants." https://lnkd.in/enWQjrF View in LinkedIn

INTERSECTING LIVES. "Countless non-cellular entities have individual life-histories, which they achieve through contributing to the lives and life-histories of the larger entities in which they collaborate, and this collaboration constitutes their claim to life." https://lnkd.in/e7VVjkg View in LinkedIn

"POLYPLOIDY (more than two sets of chromosomes) is a competitive advantageous strategy in flowering plants, and is consistent with a history of domestication, but rarely seen in filamentous fungi." https://lnkd.in/enWQjrF View in LinkedIn

LIFE AS COLLABORATIVE. "Life, according to our analysis, occurs at the intersection of lineage formation and (typically collaborative) involvement in metabolism. Entities that are problem cases, such as viruses, can be understood as alive when actively collaborating. When not collaborating, they have at most a potential for life." https://lnkd.in/e7VVjkg View in LinkedIn

CROP INNOVATION. "Our present results underline that crop innovation has been a generally important factor in shaping extant leaf-cutting ant societies, as ploidy elaborations correlate both with the scale of farming (colony size) and with somatic division of labour (worker size variation) in the ant colonies rearing the crops." https://lnkd.in/enWQjrF View in LinkedIn

MODERN DEFINITION OF LIFE. "Any entity that has the ability to store and exchange information autonomously." https://lnkd.in/eyhNP82 View in LinkedIn