I’m a terrible YouTuber — uncharismatic, dull, lacking in visual skills, and incapable of maintaining a consistent schedule — but heck, I’ll try again. Tomorrow (Saturday, 20 December), I’ll go live around 3pm Central time. I’m open to talking about just about anything, but will center the discussion on this paper:
Christopher J. Kay, Anja Spang, Gergely J. Szöllősi, Davide Pisani, Tom A. Williams & Philip C. J. Donoghue (2025) Dated gene duplications elucidate the evolutionary assembly of eukaryotes. Nature, 3 December 2025, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09808-z.
If you don’t want to read an 11 page technical paper, just contemplate this figure:
Or you can just tune in and maybe I’ll explain it.
is this an attempt to untangle the tree of life’s lateral gene transfer root snarl?
Speaking of science, contemplate the wonders of the tRUMP fusion reactor:
https://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyimages/3222.png
Not really relevant: the authors assemble a tree of patterns of descent, which they wouldn’t be able to do it there was a great deal of horizontal gene transfer.
i didn’t even read the abstract before asking. still, cool stuff. i love patterns of descent.
“Patterns of descent” is a great name for a metal band.
I’ve got to re-watch The Princess Bride this weekend.
Looking at the bubble labeled meiosis and looking at the time line presented in the paper, does this mean that sex was invented at about 2.0 Ga?
Rootball beng too ingrown is one of the biggest and worst causes of plant mortaity in tubestock. Found from many years experience to be fact. FWIW here.
I just wonder how accessible it would be. Admittedly I noticed that I’m ignorant in the field of cell biology. For me to understand a lot would probably take a lot of explaining.
Wow you’re really getting into the weeds with this one. I recall from reading Evolutionary Concepts in Immunology by Robert Jack & Louis Du Pasquier how that part of the diagram showing the lysosome/endosome connecting to phagocytosis can be exploited in humans thanks to the invention of air conditioning. I recall vaguely the infamous case of this in the 70s sensationalized to the extent the world would end. I’ll probably get this wrong but Legionella pneumophila prey on amoebae in ponds. ACs form mini ponds and this bacterium finds its way into humans and does to our macrophages what it would normally do to amoebae, exploiting an ancient aspect of cellular biology. Not the nice sort of bacterial ingestion that led to mitochondria, our energetic powerhouses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phagosome