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THE MASTERPIECE OF NATURE. "The largest and most perfect animals are now propagated by sexual reproduction only, which seems to have been the chef d'oevre, or capital work of nature." (Darwin, 1803). https://lnkd.in/dqHKSHG View in LinkedIn

NATURE DOES NOT AWAYS IMPROVE. "We agree with the long-espoused view that most polyploid entities likely go extinct shortly after formation, at the scale of small populations, before becoming established as evolutionarily significant entities or receiving taxonomic recognition. In that sense, polyploids are often ‘dead-ends." https://lnkd.in/dggZQc9 View in LinkedIn

ROAD TO EXTINCTION. "The trait (e.g., inbreeding, asexual reproduction) cannot persist as a long-term strategy due to lineages that exhibit it having limited potential for adaptation and speciation, thus eventually going extinct." https://lnkd.in/dk4-FyV View in LinkedIn

INTELLIGENT GROUPS. "Flocks of birds flying in lockstep formation and schools of fish swimming in coherent array abruptly turn together with no leader guiding the group. Ants form complex societies whose survival derives from specialized laborers, unguided by a central director." An intelligence that exceeds that of the simple unitary players. https://lnkd.in/duzJtba View in LinkedIn

SUBSYSTEM LINKS. "Some of the most engaging and perplexing natural phenomena are those in which highly-structured collective behavior emerges over time from the interaction of simple subsystems." https://lnkd.in/duzJtba View in LinkedIn

UNEXPECTED COMBINATIONS. "A single-celled bacterium is alive, but if you separate the macromolecules that combined to create the bacterium, these units are not alive. Based on our knowledge of macromolecules, we would not have been able to predict that they could combine to form a living organism, nor could we have predicted all of the characteristics of the resulting bacterium." http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/biological-complexity-and-integrative-levels-of-organization-468 View in LinkedIn

EMERGENCE in the silicon world of code and malware evolution is a topic worth looking at. Even in the world of biology, or even in physics, with sophisticated analytical tools available, we still are unable to predict emergent behavior as scale changes. A snowflake is not a glacier. View in LinkedIn

CONTEMPORARY EXAMPLE. "Are cosmic rays really causing Toyota's woes? With more than 3,000 complaints to U.S. regulators of random sudden acceleration problems in Toyota models, several researchers say single event upsets deserve a close look." http://web.archive.org/web/20100322200332/http://www.freep.com/article/20100316/BUSINESS0104/3160361/1318/Are-cosmic-rays-really-causing-Toyotas-woes View in LinkedIn

SINGLE EVENT UPSETS. "Electronics makers have known for decades about "single event upsets," computer errors from radiation created when cosmic rays strike the atmosphere." https://lnkd.in/dkrN6nP View in LinkedIn

NANO INCREASES COSMIC MUTATION RISK. An Intel patent application: "Cosmic ray induced computer crashes have occurred and are expected to increase with frequency as devices (for example, transistors) decrease in size in chips. This problem is projected to become a major limiter of computer reliability in the next decade." http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2580933/cosmic-rays-what-is-the-probability-they-will-affect-a-program View in LinkedIn