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The identification of genes underlying complex quantitative traits such as grain yield by means of conventional genetic analysis (positional cloning) requires the development of several large mapping populations. However, it is possible that phenotypically related, but more extreme, allelic variants generated by mutational studies could provide a means for more efficient cloning of QTLs (quantitative trait loci). In barley (Hordeum vulgare), with the development of high-throughput genome analysis tools, efficient genome-wide identification of genetic loci harbouring mutant alleles has recently become possible. Genotypic data from NILs (near-isogenic lines) that carry induced or natural variants of genes that control aspects of plant development can be compared with the location of QTLs to potentially identify candidate genes for development--related traits such as grain yield. As yield itself can be divided into a number of allometric component traits such as tillers per plant, kernels per spike and kernel size, mutant alleles that both affect these traits and are located within the confidence intervals for major yield QTLs may represent extreme variants of the underlying genes. In addition, the development of detailed comparative genomic models based on the alignment of a high-density barley gene map with the rice and sorghum physical maps, has enabled an informed prioritization of 'known function' genes as candidates for both QTLs and induced mutant genes.

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The article attempts to elucidate the connection between Deleuze and idealism partly by answering an apparently futile question: What kind of idealist was Deleuze? The author answers it by resorting to a deep (geo)chemistry, which allows him first to discern a parallel between Hegel’s pleas for a new world and Deleuze’s summons to a new earth and then to recognize that Schelling’s Ungrund concept influenced Deleuze’s version of those ambitions as the indifference preceding all difference and hence prior to all synthesis. However, Deleuze’s idealism is also Kantian - Grant sees Kantian “ethico-teleology” in Deleuze and Guattari’s call for a new people. Grant rejects this shared element in their thinking and replaces it with a less anthropocentric approach derived from chemistry through which he arrives at the absolute empiricism of Schelling’s nature-philosophy, which explains the ideal through the real. Schelling maintains that ubiquitous chemical processes explain all sensation and that all chemical processes contain sensation as a component. With the help of this empiricism devoid of things, Grant concludes that the new earth is nothing more than a blind chemical synthesis in which evil is the will of the ungrounded ground. In this chemical philosophy, evil itself - Schelling’s movement towards particularization - becomes material, and the ontology of absolute empiricism becomes the chemistry of darkness.