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UNCOUPLING AND INCREASED INTERACTIONS. "A further decrease in maximum size during the Cenozoic may relate to the evolution of bats, the Cretaceous mass extinction, or further specialization of flying birds. The decoupling of insect size and atmospheric pO2 coincident with the radiation of birds suggests that biotic interactions, such as predation and competition, superseded oxygen as the most important constraint on maximum body size of the largest insects." https://lnkd.in/dEANyiE View in LinkedIn

STEPS BACK. "If you want to create life more simplistically than modern life is doing it, you can't use the sophisticated solutions modern life has evolved. It means you end up constructing your own building blocks. You have to build systems that are based on much simpler components. You actually need to have some of these components to carry more than one functionality." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

RELATIONSHIP OF SIZE AND O2. "The data are best explained by a model relating maximum size to atmospheric environmental oxygen concentration (pO2) until the end of the Jurassic, and then at constant sizes, independent of oxygen fluctuations, during the Cretaceous and, at a smaller size, the Cenozoic. Maximum insect size decreased even as atmospheric pO2 rose in the Early Cretaceous following the evolution and radiation of early birds, particularly as birds acquired adaptations that allowed more agile flight." https://lnkd.in/dEANyiE View in LinkedIn

ANY MATERIALS. "In principle, you could build living systems out of robotics parts. Life is a much more general process than what we see in modern biology. You can have living processes carried by robotic systems, by computational systems and by mixtures of biological, robotics and computational systems." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

HYPEROXYGENATED PERIOD. "Because metabolic oxygen demand increases with increasing body size, environmental oxygen concentration (pO2) is frequently invoked as an important constraint on the size of animals. Giant late Paleozoic insects, with wingspans as large as 70 cm, are the iconic example of the oxygen-body size link; hyperoxic conditions during the Carboniferous and Permian are thought to have permitted the spectacular sizes of the largest insects ever." https://lnkd.in/dEANyiE View in LinkedIn

ENERGETIC PREREQUISITE. "The way we have to get to a system that can undergo evolution is, we first need self-replication. We need to put materials together in a way such that the result of their interactions is that the whole system replicates. To make that happen you need free energy to drive the whole thing. That’s why metabolism is also necessary as it can drive the replication process." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

FIRST STEP. "How do you get the first system to replicate? There's a process called self-assembly where you can aggregate materials and suddenly get new properties. For instance, if you have a lipid molecule in water, if you allow many, many lipid molecules to swim around in water, then they will form a membrane. Once you have a membrane, suddenly you can design an outside and an inside. You'll be able to define permeability through the membrane." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

REPLICATION FIRST. "Walter said the problem is not understanding survival of the fittest but understanding arrival of the fittest. How can a system acquire the ability to replicate? You cannot have evolution of a system toward its ability to replicate. Replication is necessary before you can have evolution. Something else has to come into play before you have the first system that can undergo evolution." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

"EVOLUTION does not just occur in biological systems." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

TECHNOLOGICAL EVOLUTION. "There is also selection in society today between technologies, where different possible solutions are put to the market, where certain technologies prevail while other companies have to retool, do something else. That’s just how it is. Evolutionary technological processes are also documented in the literature by following patent records to see how different technologies are related." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn