Really, he was writing about health, or organisms in relation to their environment - which defines disability. Which unavoidably has psychological and sociological implications, when we move onto psychiatry and sexology. These being the two most famous concerns of Foucalt; insanity and paraohilia.

Presenting a symptom, does not itself define subjective illness.

The impairment must be related to the measure of the individual in reference to itself, as much as it can tolerate changed states, without endangering its holistic function as a living thing.

At face value it seems irrelevant to biology, to say that the deletriousness of a condition, may only be asessed by the patient. There are certainly problems with the statement. But its certainly relevant to, for example, conceptualising disability.

Canguilhem distinguished the merely non-normal from the truly abnormal, which involves the infraction of the average, in a way impairing its organic functioning. The latter is not merely statistical, but is often tinged by observer assumptions.

He also pondered much, as a physicisn by training, the definition and of pathology, and its usual (but incorrect) opposition to normalcy. Themes in the thought of Foucalt. We may ask in biology, "Are there genuine sciences of normal and pathological?"

Canguilhem viewed the function of organisms as a relation to their ambient milieu, this being his legacy to sociology and psychology.

Like Nietzsche he viewed living things, by their survival, as exceeding the sum of their parts, and therefore their very nature exceeds any chemistry or mechanics.

✅ 1. It defines "strains" above 99.99% ANI.
Molecular biologists have traditionally used "strain" interchangeably with "colony" or "clone", and usually imply identical bacterial "individuals", often with completely identical genomes and implied identical phenotypes... 2/n

Sim Earth?

Really a lot of traditional taxa used by the paleo-mammalogists are purely typological. Groups like 'cimolestids', 'palaeoryctids', and 'hyopsodontids' may approach members of other arbitrary categories. And the memberships of these taxa, might well compose polyphyletic assemblages.

If you exclude the didelphodontines, which are really basal hyaenodonts (like Wyolestes) then the core palaeoryctids, are generalised eutherians. They might fall into the stem group, yet might be afrotherian, or laurasiatherian and something close to eulipotyphlans.

On zoogeographical grounds, it seems as though Apternodontidae would be ideal ancestors for Solenodon. Yet the land mammals of the Caribbean are South American, and the Nesophontes + Solenodon LCA was presumably West Indian. So were apternodontids another convergent morph?

Tooth morphology poorly distinguishes dilambdodont from zalambdodont forms. Both morphs are definitively present, in the well supported West Indian insectivore clade. And derive from a Potamogale-like 'protozalsmbdodont' morph.

The UCEs have, unexpectedly, found talpids basal to a clade of West Indian 'insectivores', plus a subclade of soricids plus erinaceids.

Whereas I found morphological data to recover Cope's Dilambdodonta, or soricids and talpids + bats. Curiously the Van Valen diagram does not include basal bats.

I do wonder wether eulipotyphlans really are monophyletic, to the exclusion of supposed non-eulipotyphlans, such as 'palaeoryctids'.

The sort of material usually fossilised and diagnosed to a taxon, can't readily distinguish Afro-Madagascan from Northern Hemisphere Holocene insectivores.

Not all these groupings are neccessarily natural, and not all of them are eutherian. Leptictids, zalambdalestids, and (at least) part of the endotherioids, are cases in point. So the bottom left represents the stem and basal placental stock. ('Cimolestans' are perhaps the laurasiathere mainline?