Friday 7 September 2012

Lynn Margulis - endosymbiosis - hybridogenesis

It appears that Lynn Margulis championed a few ideas on how some insects began inhabiting other insects and plants... leading to changes in growth patterns.  I first read about her theories recently in Nick Lane's Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the meaning of life, in a discussion about the endosymbiosis of mitochondria into the eukaryote...

Just now I remembered a theory that I'd read somewhere a few years back.. that the caterpillar and the butterfly were once two separate insects, and somehow the two genomes mixed... (by virus? or microRNA? or endosymbiosis? or mimicry?)  I had a quick search and discovered this blog article from BugTracks:
"modern metamorphosing insects arose when velvet worms (phylum Onychophora) somehow hybridized with primitive arthropods"
"she somehow intuited that I would one day become obsessed with gall-making insects, and she showed me a chapter in a book she had edited in which it was hypothesized that fleshy fruits arose when gall-making insects happened to induce galls in the reproductive tissues of plants, so that the genetic coding for gallmaking was incorporated into the plant’s heritable genome."
read more:  http://bugtracks.wordpress.com/2011/11/22/lynn-margulis/
and this paper: Caterpillars evolved from onychophorans by hybridogenesis
and this response: Caterpillars did not evolve from onychophorans by hybridogenesis

Lynn Margulis died of a stroke, 22 November, 2011.

Other interesting effects are Mimicry, Mimetism, Camouflage etc... changes forced through environmental pressures. ...

[Parthenogenesis - Hybridogenesis]

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