(no subject)

Woese is postulating a golden age of pre-Darwinian life, during which horizontal gene transfer was universal and separate species did not exist. Life was then a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic information so that clever chemical tricks and catalytic processes invented by one creature could be inherited by all of them. Evolution was a communal affair, the whole community advancing in metabolic and reproductive efficiency as the genes of the most efficient cells were shared. But then, one evil day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find itself one jump ahead of its neighbors in efficiency. That cell separated itself from the community and refused to share. Its offspring became the first species. With its superior efficiency, it continued to prosper and to evolve separately....

And now, in the last 30 years, Homo sapiens has revived the ancient pre-Darwinian practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, blurring the boundaries between species. We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species will no longer exist, and the evolution of life will again be communal.

The above link via this Language Log post.

In science news, changing vegetation might make severe weather worse. "Earth's climate is all about relationships, and this study shows that ground cover plays a significant part in determining changes in climate extremes.... climate change will affect what vegetation grows where and that those vegetation changes can feed back to further change the mean climate state. But this is the first insight we've had into whether those vegetation changes will also change the frequency and magnitude of extreme temperature and precipitation events, such as droughts and severe storms."

Today, skygypsy posted this link on bundle theory and this other link on bundle theory. Something I read behind that second link forced me to link to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem.

If any of you can write a coherent essay connecting all of the above links plus the ones in yesterday's post, I shall give you a cookie.

A bit of my wayward mind is trying to get me to write said essay, but I'd really much rather have the cookie.