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PREDATORS. "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." https://lnkd.in/eCG7b3z View in LinkedIn

PRIMORDIAL DIGITAL SOUP. "Someday the Net will be the summation of the world's total computing resources. All computers will link up into a chaotic digital soup in which everything is connected - indirectly or directly - to everything else." https://lnkd.in/e6ExXVY View in LinkedIn

ADAPTED SPECIES. "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

DIGITAL CONTAGIONS, a history. https://lnkd.in/ebfBn_S View in LinkedIn

GROWTH. "Although accurate numbers are difficult to derive, reports over the last few years indicate an approximate yearly doubling in the number of systems infected by computer viruses. Clearly, computer viruses are exhibiting significant growth." https://lnkd.in/eCG7b3z View in LinkedIn

MUTATING REPLICONS. "Once the soup is full of replicating creatures, individuals are initially short lived, generally reproducing only once before dying, thus individuals turn over very rapidly. More slowly, there appear new genotypes of size 80, and then new size classes. There are changes in the genetic composition of each size class, as new mutants appear, some of which increase significantly in frequency, eventually replacing the original genotype." (TS Ray). https://lnkd.in/eYcp73P View in LinkedIn

FOOTNOTE. Was the Cambrian explosion an artifact of massive geological events that wiped clean a vast swathe of biological history in most of the globe? The idea of the Cambrian explosion has been deeply embedded in biology, but begs more questions than it answers. Hold that thought for another time. View in LinkedIn

CAMBRIAN SHADOW. "This work represents a first step in this direction, creating an artificial world which may roughly parallel the RNA world of self-replicating molecules (still falling far short of the Cambrian explosion)." (TS Ray). https://lnkd.in/eYcp73P View in LinkedIn

DIVERSITY. "The work presented here aims to parallel the second major event in the history of life, the origin of diversity. Rather than attempting to create prebiotic conditions from which life may emerge, this approach involves engineering over the early history of life to design complex evolvable organisms, and then attempting to create the conditions that will set off a spontaneous evolutionary process of increasing diversity and complexity of organisms." (TS Ray). https://lnkd.in/eYcp73P View in LinkedIn

FLY IN OINTMENT. "Most evolutionary simulations are not open-ended. Their potential is limited by the structure of the model, which generally endows each individual with a genome consisting of a set of pre-defined genes, each of which may exist in a pre-defined set of allelic forms." False assumption given what we know about horizontal gene shuffling. (TS Ray). https://lnkd.in/eYcp73P View in LinkedIn