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HORIZONTAL GENE TRANSFER. "It is easy to see why mutating binary code would make it rather impossible to discover new functionality: the fraction of neutral changes is just too low. On the contrary, integration of pieces of functional code and/or importing functions and APIs available in the computer environment have a much higher probability of being neutral, and very rarely even beneficial." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

BREEDING MALWARE. "A threat might be able to snatch code from another program in its environment. We have seen examples of a virus like Pinfi jumping on top of worms to replicate in new environments as a combination threat. Security products do not always recognize the worm once it is infected with a virus, and the combination helps the survival of both threats." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

ENHANCED GENE HUNTING. "Neutrality enables the organism to better sample the pool of available mutations by being able to discover beneficial mutants without constantly being penalized by the already high frequency of deleterious mutations. Beneficial mutations are hard to come by in a single try, but can become more likely if interspersed by a series of neutral ones. In essence, neutral mutations allow organisms to buy more time in their quest for discovering survivability-enhancing traits." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

MOSTLY HARMLESS. "It is clear that the emergence of an evolvable threat could be potentially disastrous. On the other hand, it is entirely possible that evolution will in most cases lead to harmless forms of a threat, as is often observed in biology." Cold comfort for the small percentage of disastrous threats. https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

PREREQUISITES OF COMPLEXITY. "Finally, the number of variants (mutants) with non-zero fitness (sometimes called the neutral fraction of mutants) should be sizable. It has been shown that ideally between 10%-40% of all mutations experienced by a population need to be neutral to ensure evolvability. (Note that the fraction of mutants of biological proteins is also in that range.)" https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

PREREQUISITES OF COMPLEXITY IN ARTIFICIAL LIFE. "First and foremost are of course the three conditions for Darwinian evolution themselves: replication, variation and selection. Of those, replication and selection are naturally present, and we argued above that variation can occur via a variety of mechanisms. However, in order for sufficient variation to be present so that selection can act efficiently, population sizes should be large." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

"COMPLEX FUNCTIONALITY can evolve from much simpler functions in Artificial Life platforms, over the course of a few days, and complex adaptations have been seen to emerge after tens to tens of thousands of generations, easily within range of weeks of malware evolution." Aeons of evolutionary time which are necessary in biological systems are not required in digital ecosystems. https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

CODE NATURAL SELECTION. "Those features that provide the virus with an evolutionary advantage (e.g., escaping detection, infecting different platforms, etc.) will be propagated, leading to unanticipated complex behaviors." The survival of the fittest code, in Darwinian terms. https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

LARGE CODE SOURCE. "As in biology, the collection of software and APIs in an operating system environment is sufficient for providing a pool of features that a virus can choose to sample." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

THE LEAPING ACCUMULATION OF SMALLS. "The myriad examples...of unintended virus behaviors due to random changes are all examples of more complex behaviors originating from simpler ones through small programming jumps." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn