Year: 2022

PROFESSOR HOD LIPSON. "Beginning in 2009, he and his Cornell University graduate student Michael Schmidt developed software named Eureqa capable of deriving equations, mathematical relationships and laws of nature from sets of data." https://lnkd.in/dHKcrCf View in LinkedIn

LIPSON'S EUREQUA was capable of "deriving Newton's second law of motion from a data set of positions and velocities of a double pendulum." Breathtaking achievement. Read again. https://lnkd.in/dHKcrCf View in LinkedIn

FROM DATA TO LAWS. "We have demonstrated the discovery of physical laws, from scratch, directly from experimentally captured data with the use of a computational search. We used the presented approach to detect nonlinear energy conservation laws, Newtonian force laws, geometric invariants, and system manifolds in various synthetic and physically implemented systems without prior knowledge about physics, kinematics, or geometry." https://lnkd.in/dJJ9HmD View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE for this and next weekend contemplates lateral or horizontal gene transfer. This has been a fly in the ointment for traditional Mendelian genetics. Along with the idea of engulfment of entire organisms in an extreme form of symbiosis that separately gave rise to the mitochondria and the chloroplast, horizontal gene transfer has significantly mucked up tidy vertical inheritance trees. View in LinkedIn

LATERAL GENOMICS. "The wide spread of gene exchange and loss in the prokaryotic world has prompted the concept of ‘lateral genomics’ to the point of an outright denial of the relevance of phylogenetic trees for evolution." https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

GENE GAIN EXCEEDS GENE LOSS. "Quantitatively, however, horizontal gene transfer (HGT) dominates microbial evolution, with the rate of gene gain and loss being comparable to the rate of point mutations and much greater than the duplication rate." https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

MAJOR TRANSITIONS. "Recent phylogenomic analyses suggest that episodes of massive HGT were pivotal for the emergence of major groups of organisms such as multiple archaeal phyla as well as eukaryotes." (HGT = horizontal gene transfer). https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

CURIOUS PARADOX. "Similar analyses appear to indicate that, in addition to donating hundreds of genes to the emerging eukaryotic lineage, mitochondrial endosymbiosis severely curtailed HGT." (HGT = horizontal gene transfer). https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

TREE THINKING DEBATE. "The concept of ‘lateral genomics’...posits that the dominant process in microbial evolution is gene exchange between organisms rather than vertical descent along a tree. In its extreme form, lateral genomics denies the relevance of tree-like evolution and “tree thinking” in biology altogether." https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

HEATED DEBATE. "A computational pipeline that automatically produced a comprehensive ‘Tree of Life’ (TOL) from a concatenated sequence alignment of universal proteins was hailed as a major advance of phylogenomics, only to be immediately debunked as a “tree of 1%”, i.e. one that (at best) accurately reflects the evolutionary history of only a small fraction of microbial genes." https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn