Year: 2022

MODULAR METABOLISM. "Biophysicist Ilya Nemenman from Emory University has identified key parameters which distill the behaviour of several biochemical networks, into simple equivalent dynamics. It appears that the details of the complexity of these biological systems don't matter, as long as some aggregate property, which we've calculated, remains the same." https://lnkd.in/d7wfFBs View in LinkedIn

AGGREGATE SIMPLICITY EMERGES. "The larger and more complex the system gets, the more the aggregate behavior is visible...The completion time gets simpler and simpler as the system size goes up." https://lnkd.in/d7wfFBs View in LinkedIn

FINAL OUTPUT. "We may be able to simplify the model for these immune receptors from about 3,000 steps to three steps...You wouldn't need a supercomputer to test different chemical compounds on the receptors, because you don't need to simulate every single step – just the aggregate." https://lnkd.in/d7wfFBs View in LinkedIn

EMERGENT PROPERTIES. "Chaotic dynamics and fractal space in biochemistry: Simplicity underlies complexity. Non-linear interactions in and between spatial and temporal domains and over wide ranges of scales underlie the emergent properties of complex biological systems." https://lnkd.in/dNkqWKk View in LinkedIn

TAMING COMPLEXITY. "The explicit search for simplicity uncovers new and unexpected features of the biological system and that the evidence for simplification gives us a language with which to phrase new questions for the next generation of experiments. The fact that similar mathematical structures succeed in taming the complexity of very different biological systems hints that there is something more general to be discovered." https://lnkd.in/ddBeYeg View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS the tiptoes into the simplicity that underpins complexity in the natural world. It is intuitive that complexity did not just arose full-blown at the first instant, and that simple systems gradually complexified to create the bigger system. The fly in the ointment is that gnarly thing called Emergence, wherein the sum is greater than its (simple) parts. View in LinkedIn

STERILE SEXUAL OFFSPRING. "Interestingly, there is also one case where two different strains of a Macintosh virus are known to interact to form infections unlike the “parents,” although these interactions usually produce “sterile” offspring that are unable to reproduce further. This likewise does not appear to be evolution as we know it." https://lnkd.in/eCG7b3z View in LinkedIn

GROWTH. "Viruses certainly do exhibit a form of growth, in the sense that there are more of them in a given environment over time. Some transient viruses will infect every file on a system after only a few activations. The spread of viruses through commercial software and public bulletin boards is another indication of their wide-spread replication." https://lnkd.in/eCG7b3z View in LinkedIn

SPECIATION. "Computer viruses exhibit “species” with well-defined ecological niches based on host machine type, and variations within these species. These species are adapted to specific environments and will not survive if moved to a different environment." https://lnkd.in/eCG7b3z View in LinkedIn

PREDATION. "Some viruses also exhibit predatory behavior. For instance, the DenZuk virus will seek out and overwrite instances of the Brain virus if both are present on the same system. Other viruses exhibit territorial behavior — marking their infected domain so that others of the same type will not enter and compete with the original infection. Some viruses also exhibit self-protective behavior, including camouflage techniques." https://lnkd.in/eCG7b3z View in LinkedIn