Month: September 2022

PLAYFUL BOTS. "Useful, playful robots are the future at Tokyo exhibition." https://lnkd.in/dT9eBni View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE for this and next weekend is a contemplation of the commonly held idea that complexity in nature continues to increase. This is an attractive concept, and aligns with our own self-image as the height of evolution. It makes for a tidy world view. But biology is rarely tidy, and is more frequently full of exceptions, and these exceptions are at the heart of the remarkable diversity of the natural world. View in LinkedIn

INEXORABLE COMPLEXIFICATION. "From a more general standpoint, there are effectively irrefutable arguments for a genuine increase in complexity during evolution. Indeed, the successive emergence of higher grades of complexity throughout the history of life is impossible to ignore." (Spoken by a simplicity advocate). http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.201300037/full View in LinkedIn

IS COMPLEXITY VALUABLE? "Over billions of years, life has evolved into the extraordinarily diverse and complex organisms that populate the Earth today. Although evolution often proceeds toward increasing complexity, more complex traits do not necessarily make organisms more fit. So when and why is greater complexity favored?" https://lnkd.in/dUUFYJe View in LinkedIn

STEPWISE ARGUMENT. "Thus, unicellular eukaryotes that, regardless of the exact dating, evolved more than a billion years after the prokaryotes, obviously attained a new level of complexity, and multicellular eukaryotic forms, appearing even later, by far exceeded the complexity of the unicellular ones. Arguably, the most compelling is the argument from the origin of cellular life itself: before the first cells emerged, there must have been some much simpler (pre)biological replicating entities." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.201300037/full View in LinkedIn

BLACK BOX. "Although complex traits are omnipresent in life at different biological scales, with examples ranging from butterfly wing patterning to the assembly of multiprotein complexes, little is known about the stepwise trajectories through which complex traits arise in nature." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.12416/full View in LinkedIn

COMPLEXITY BREEDS COOPERATION. "An incredible amount of cooperation is required for individual cells to come together and function as one, and with natural selection acting at the level of the individual cell, there will be significant evolutionary pressure to cheat the system and sabotage the success of the multicellular whole." https://lnkd.in/ddGmx4i View in LinkedIn

DIVISION OF LABOR. "The complexity that we observe in nature can often be explained in terms of cooperative behavior. For example, the major transitions of evolution required the emergence of cooperation among the lower-level units of selection, which led to specialization through division-of-labor ultimately resulting in spontaneous order." https://lnkd.in/dETZCrk View in LinkedIn

TWO QUESTIONS. "There are two aspects to address explaining how such cooperation is sustained: how free-riders are prevented from free-riding on the benefits of cooperative tasks and, just as importantly, how those social benefits arise." http://adb.sagepub.com/content/23/5/315.short View in LinkedIn

COORDINATED FUNCTIONALITY. "Biologists recognize that integrated system complexity is a feature of living systems. That is, some biological systems consist of component parts that interact in a coordinated way so that the system as a whole exhibits a specific function." https://lnkd.in/dJG4bYH View in LinkedIn