National Historic Places Designation for Margulis Home and Offices Amherst College joins a groundswell to have the former residence and offices (1988-2011) of University of Massachu- setts-Amherst Distinguished University Professor of Botany, Biology and Geosciences Lynn Margulis recognized as an historic place. James Lovelock at 101-years old on Gaia and Covid-19. How to Think Like an Epidemiologist By Siobhan Roberts New York Times Aug. 4, 2020 “It is a statistician’s rejoinder — sometimes offered as wry criticism, sometimes as honest advice — that could hardly be a better motto for our times: “Update your priors!” In stats lingo, “priors” are your prior knowledge and beliefs, inevitably fuzzy and uncertain, before seeing evidence. Evidence prompts an updating; and then more evidence prompts further updating, so forth and so on. This iterative process hones greater certainty and generates a coherent accumulation of knowledge. Amherst College has purchased and rennovated 20 Triangle Street to serve as the offices of the Emily Dickison Museum next door. Lynn Margulis would be thrilled with this news! Side porch and rear deck of Lynn Margulis home with blanket of Winter snow. This was the entrance to the kitchen that welcomed her students and colleagues from all over the world. This is the heart of Bayesian analysis, named after Thomas Bayes, an 18th-century Presbyterian minister who did math on the side. It captures uncertainty in terms of probability: Bayes’s theorem, or rule, is a device for rationally updating your prior beliefs and uncertainties based on observed evidence.”
Transcript
National Historic Places Designation for Margulis Home
and OfficesAmherst College joins a groundswell to have the former residence and offices (1988-2011) of University of Massachu-setts-Amherst Distinguished University Professor of Botany, Biology and Geosciences Lynn Margulis recognized as an historic place.
James Lovelock at 101-years old on Gaia and Covid-19.
How to Think Like an EpidemiologistBy Siobhan Roberts New York Times Aug. 4, 2020
“It is a statistician’s rejoinder — sometimes offered as wry criticism, sometimes as honest advice — that could hardly be a better motto for our times: “Update your priors!”
In stats lingo, “priors” are your prior knowledge and beliefs, inevitably fuzzy and uncertain, before seeing evidence. Evidence prompts an updating; and then more evidence prompts further updating, so forth and so on. This iterative process hones greater certainty and generates a coherent accumulation of knowledge.
Amherst College has purchased and rennovated 20 Triangle Street to serve as the offices of the Emily Dickison Museum next door. Lynn Margulis would be thrilled with this news!
Side porch and rear deck of Lynn Margulis home with blanket of Winter snow. This was the entrance to the kitchen that welcomed her students and colleagues from all over the world.
This is the heart of Bayesian analysis, named after Thomas Bayes, an 18th-century Presbyterian minister who did math on the side. It captures uncertainty in terms of probability: Bayes’s theorem, or rule, is a device for rationally updating your prior beliefs and uncertainties based on observed evidence.”
Careening the HMS Beagle during Charles Darwin’s voyage. Oxford Natural History Museum.
‘We’ve created a civilisation hell bent on destroying itself – I’m terrified’James DykeSenior Lecturer in Global Systems, University of Exeter
“The IPCC reviews the vast amounts of science being generated around climate change and produces assessment reports every four years. Given the impact the IPPC’s findings can have on policy and industry, great care is made to carefully present and communicate its scientific findings. So I wasn’t expecting much when I straight out asked him how much warming he thought we were going to achieve before we manage to make the required cuts to greenhouse gas emissions. ‘Oh, I think we’re heading towards 3°C at least,’ he said...‘But what about the many millions of people directly threatened,’ I went on. ‘Those living in low-lying nations, the farmers affected by abrupt changes in weather, kids exposed to new diseases?’He gave a sigh, paused for a few seconds, and a sad, resigned smile crept over his face. He then simply said: ‘They will die.’”
Save The Whales. Save The Tigers. Save The Tapeworms?
From: Bruno Clarke Subject: fourth envevo newsletter for 2020Date: July 11, 2020 at 11:20 PMTo: Julie Brigham-Grette [email protected]: James MacAllister [email protected]
“Hello everyone: Thanks, Jim, for everything you are doing on Lynn's behalf. About David Grinspoon's Life in Human Hands: it's a fine book all the way through, so well argued that it almost reconciled me to the notion of "the Anthropocene." His chapter on Lynn and Gaia in NASA/astrobiological context is well worth checking out”From the publisher, Hachette Book Group:“For the first time in Earth’s history, our planet is experiencing a confluence of rapidly accelerating changes prompted by one species: humans. Climate change is only the most visible of the modifications we’ve made—up until this point, inadvertently—to the planet. And our current behavior threatens not only our own future but that of countless other creatures. By comparing Earth’s story to those of other planets, astrobiologist David Grinspoon shows what a strange and novel development it is for a species to evolve to build machines, and ultimately, global societies with world-shaping influence. Without minimizing the challenges of the next century, Grinspoon suggests that our present moment is not only one of peril, but also great potential, especially when viewed from a 10,000-year perspective. Our species has surmounted the threat of extinction before, thanks to our innate ingenuity and ability to adapt, and there’s every reason to believe we can do so again.”Details about David Grinspoon’s book tour are posted on the the Earth in Human Hands Facebook page.”
Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet’s Future by David Grinspoon.
New insight into the evolution of complex life on EarthScience News August 6, 2020“Summary: A novel connection between primordial organisms and complex life has been discovered, as new evidence sheds light on the evolutionary origins of the cell division process that is fundamental to complex life on Earth....”“Now a common regulatory mechanism has been discovered in the cell division of both archaea and eukaryotes after the researchers demonstrated for the first time that the proteasome -- sometimes referred to as the waste disposal system of the cell -- regulates the cell division in Sulfolobus acidocaldarius by selectively breaking down a specific set of proteins.”
“The authors report: ‘This is important because the proteasome has not previously been shown to control the cell division process of archaea.’The proteasome is evolutionarily conserved in both archaea and eukaryotes and it is already well established that selective proteasome-mediated protein degradation plays a key role in the cell cycle regulation of eukaryotes.”.
The proteasome--sometimes referred to as the waste disposal system of the cell -- regulates the cell division in Sulfolobus acidocaldarius (above).
From: Bruno Latour Date: August 2, 2020 To: Andrew Brousseau You will be glad to know that thanks to Bruce Clarke the Margulis section in Zkm expo I curate is magnificent. Here is a shot.
Perry Marshall writes, “In October I'm presenting at the Cancer and Evolution Symposium which I'm co-organizing with James Shapiro, Frank Laukien
and Denis Noble with speakers such as George Church, Paul Davies and Michael Levin. My talk is called "Cellular Cognition and the Volitional Turing Machine" and I am attempting to use information theory and computer science to buttress the cognition argument. You can see the conference schedule and my abstract at www.cancerevolution.org.”
Human sperm don’t swim the way that anyone had thoughtBy Jack J. Lee in Science News
“... Over 300 years ago, microscopy pioneer Antonie van Leeuwenhoek described sperm tails swaying in a symmetric pattern, like “that of a snake or an eel.” The prevailing view that sperm tails move in a balanced way, however, doesn’t capture what actually happens in three dimensions, researchers report July 31 in Science Advances.
High-speed 3-D microscopy of human sperm swimming freely in the lab revealed that the cells corkscrew as they move, consistent with previous studies. The sperm almost seemed to be drilling into the surrounding fluid, says Hermes Gadêlha, a mathematician at the University of Bristol in England. ...”
In her film Eukaryosis Margulis shows the movement of intact sperm (left) Part 2 of Homage to Darwin (22:40) and then “naked sperm tails (right): no DNA, no mitochondria, no membranes” that continue to move. The motion of an undulipodium resides within this ubiquitous eukaryotic structure (seme) from protists to ginko trees to animals (see pg. 7). Margulis posited that this structure and related components of eukaryotic cells were acquired by symbiogenesis. Her model, based on extant organisms, used a living spirochete. Scientific estimates are that 99.9% of all species that once colonized our planet are extinct. It is reasonable that the “Last Karyomasti-gont Organism” went extinct long ago, leaving only its symbiogenetic seme in eukaryotes. Check out Michael Chapman’s talk on undulipodia at the Lynn Margulis Memorial Symposium. It’s excellent on the karyomastigont, cytoskeleton and other
Comparison of bacterial flagellum to a cilia or undulipodium (so-called “eukaryotic flagellum”). (above and right are Lynn Margulis slides.)
Morphology of a “corkscrew-shaped spirochete. Spirocetes are often pleomorphic.
structures resulting from one or a series of symbiogenetic mergers. The papers, Spirochete Attachment Ultrastructure: Implications for the Origin and Evolution of Cilia, and Motility proteins and the origin of the nucleus are instructive.
When plants and their microbes are not in sync, the results can be disastrous
August 28, 2020“ I am a plant microbiologist interested in how plants and microbes interact with each other. Although our research in the past has centered on molecular details of pathogenic infections, this work led my lab into the fascinating world of plant microbiome.”[The article above appears to be a neo-Darwinian trying to squeeze the communities of microbiomes into the DNA of plants. Nonetheless, an acknowledgement that plants have microbiomes.]
CLOSING A GAP IN WEATHERFORECASTINGResearchers hope to improve three-week predictionsBy Alexandra Witze
“Another weather pattern that might help improve subseasonal forecasts is a quick rise in temperature in the stratosphere, a layer of the upper atmosphere, above the Arctic or Antarctic. These “sudden stratospheric warming” events happen once every couple of years in the Northern Hemisphere and much less often in the Southern Hemisphere. But when one shows up, it affects weather worldwide.”
Bruce Scofield offers up his Theme For Corona Time. Bruce has been hard at work on his new book, The Astronomy of Nature.[I have read the 484-page manuscript. I was dazzled by every page! Having known and worked with Bruce for a decade in the Margulis Lab, where he co-instructed for a variety of courses while earning his doctorate in Geoscienes, I am still surprised by the depth and breadth of the research in this “Big History” of mapping and observation of nature as a complex system. The Astronomy of Nature is eye-opening for the open- and scientifically-minded who may have little or no knowledge in this field.]
LIFE & EVOLUTIONScienceNews August 29, 2020T “Microbes awaken after epic napEven after 100 million years buried in the seafloor, some microbes can wake up. In an analysis of seafloor sediments dating from nearly 102 million to 4.3 million years ago, most of the sampled microbes turned out to be dormant, not dead, researchers report July 28 in Nature Commu-nications. The microbes came from sites beneaththe South Pacific Gyre, where there are few of the nutrients needed to fuel phytoplankton blooms that support a cascade of ocean life. As a result, very little organic matter makes its way to settle on the seafloor.But oxygen in the water does seepdeep into the sediments. So Japanese researchers wondered whether any aerobic, or oxygen-liking, microbes found there might be revivable.”
Guitarist, science historian and geoscientist, Bruce Scofield, also is the author/instructor for
the online-ready course Environmental Evolution being offered to colleges and
universities worldwide.
Targeted isolation based on metagenome‐assembled genomes reveals a phylogenetically distinct group of thermophilic spirochetes from deep biosphereSep 2020 · Environmental MicrobiologyOlga V. Karnachuk · Anastasia P. Lukina · Vitaly V. Kadnikov · Viktoria A. Sherbakova · et al“AbstractMost microorganisms from deep terrestrial subsurface remain yet uncultured. Recent achievements in recovery of metagenome-assembled genomes (MAG) provide clues for improving cultivation via metabolic reconstructions and other genomic characteristics. Here we report the isolation in pure culture of a thermophilic spirochete with the use of MAGs binned from metagenomes of the deep (> 2 km) aquifers broached by two artesian boreholes in Western Siberia. The organism constitutes a minor share in the aquifer microbial community and could not be cultivated by traditional techniques. The obtained two pure culture isolates along with three bacteria identified by MAGs represent a novel family-level lineage in the order Brevinematales. Based on genomic and phenotypic characteristics the novel spirochete is proposed to be classified as Longinema margulisiae gen. nov., sp. nov. within a novel family, Longinemaceae fam. nov. Both cultivated strains, NST and N5R, are anaerobic hemoorganoheterotrophes growing by fermentation of starch and a few sugars. They can form recalcitrant round bodies under unfavorable growth conditions, which survive up to 15 min at 95°C, and can revert to the original helical cells. We suggest that the round bodies may facilitate global distribution of this lineage, detected from molecular signatures, and colonization of subsurface environments.”
“Got along without ya before I met ya. Going to get along without you, now.” Lynn Margulis translating the song the microbes are singing to us.
Thanks to this newsletter’s contributors: Nathan Currier, Andrew Brousseau, JulieBrigham-Grette, Bruno Latour, Bruce Clarke, Elwood Root, Denis Noble, PerryMarshall, Bruce Scofield and the authors of linked videos, science papers andscience reports as quoted.
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