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GRAFTED ON. "The chimpanzee shows certain derived features which are with little doubt grafted onto the morphology typical of the higher primates." https://lnkd.in/eSbfe-f View in LinkedIn

INTRAGENOMIC CONFLICT. "The problem is not an imaginary one: there is a real danger that selection at the lower level will disrupt integration at the higher." https://lnkd.in/eZ5-m7K View in LinkedIn

STRATA DISRUPTION. "Why did not natural selection, acting on entities at the lower level (replicating molecules, free-living prokaryotes, asexual protists, single cells, individual organisms) not disrupt integration at the higher level (chromosomes, eukaryotic cells, sexual species, multicellular organisms, societies)?" https://lnkd.in/eZ5-m7K View in LinkedIn

INCREASED INFORMATION. "Mechanisms by which the quantity of genetic information can increase. The three main possibilities -- duplication and divergence, symbiosis, and epigenesis." https://lnkd.in/eZ5-m7K View in LinkedIn

GENOMES ACROSS TAXA. "The trend is fairly robust: eukaryotes have a larger coding genome than prokaryotes, higher plants and invertebrates have a larger genome than protists, and vertebrates a larger genome than invertebrates." https://lnkd.in/eZ5-m7K View in LinkedIn

COMPLEXITY CANDIDATES. "There are no generally accepted measures of biological complexity. Two possible candidates are the number of protein-coding genes, and the richness and variety of morphology and behaviour." https://lnkd.in/eZ5-m7K View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS the first week on the human foot. Nothing is as it seems to be. We usually marvel at nature's inventiveness, with good reason. But no living morsel under the sun has been purpose-built. All are transitional morphs borrowed from previous inventions, after aeons of tinkering for new functions. All are morphs in restless transitions, destination unknown, with a thousand blind ends, and a few startling successes. View in LinkedIn

CENTRAL CONTROL. "If a 'selfish' mutation occurs in a chromosomal gene, a suppressor mutation at any other locus in the genome would be favoured by selection. Hence the rest of the genome may win the contest, not because of any analogue of majority voting, but because of the large number of loci, and hence of possible suppressor mutations, that are available for each selfish mutation." https://lnkd.in/eZ5-m7K View in LinkedIn

CONTINGENT IRREVERSIBILITY EXAMPLE 7. "The reversion from sex to parthenogenesis. Amniote vertebrates, although they may be parthenogens, always require sperm from males of another species to initiate development, perhaps because the sperm provides a centriole." https://lnkd.in/eZ5-m7K View in LinkedIn

ODDITY OF LIFE. The chemist George Whitesides has stated, "How remarkable is life? The answer is: very. Those of us who deal in networks of chemical reactions know of nothing like it’." https://lnkd.in/einZ2Fh View in LinkedIn