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SO ENDS this two weekend section on imperfection in nature. One striking lesson is that the development of some bad traits are irreversible, such as molting in insects, and this can forever block a future work-around that could lead to a lineage without molting. Ninety nine percent of all species that ever existed went extinct; for sure some were by catastrophic events, but many must have been by a fatal irreversible trait that locked them into an evolutionary dead end. View in LinkedIn

"LARGE SCALE PATTERNS in the world are usually the result of the interactions of large numbers of smaller pieces that somehow combine in surprising ways to create the large-scale pattern. Such large-scale (macro-) patterns that arise out of the interactions of numerous interacting (micro-) "agents" are called "emergent phenomena" — that is, phenomena that emerge from interactions at a lower level or scale." https://lnkd.in/dPNW2Hi View in LinkedIn

FROM SIMPLE TO COMPLEX. "The most efficient of the evolved equivalence functions was just 17 lines of code — two fewer than the most efficient code the researchers had come up with beforehand. Evolving even as few as 17 lines involved a lot of incremental changes." https://lnkd.in/dvEXJwm View in LinkedIn

DIGITAL MUTATIONS. "The researchers’ simulation involves bits of software that self-replicate, but not perfectly. When the digital organisms make copies of themselves they sometimes make random errors, just as DNA is subject to mutations when it replicates." https://lnkd.in/dvEXJwm View in LinkedIn

COMPUTER SIMULATION. "They also uncovered a twist on conventional evolutionary thinking — it seems that some mutations that are harmful in the short run may boost long-term potential." https://lnkd.in/dvEXJwm View in LinkedIn

IN SILICO MODELING. "Researchers from Michigan State University have used software to prove Charles Darwin’s postulation that small, seemingly inconsequential changes over thousands of generations can result in the evolution of complex functions." https://lnkd.in/dvEXJwm View in LinkedIn

SNOWFLAKES. "There is no intelligent designer of snowflakes. No one sketches out each pattern. Snow crystals grow by themselves without blueprints, with no plan." https://lnkd.in/dvEXJwm View in LinkedIn

"SMALL LOCAL RULES–for example, charges which cause atoms to attract or repel–lead spontaneously to large scale order and complexity, including reproduction and evolution." https://lnkd.in/dvEXJwm View in LinkedIn

SIMPLE PROGRAMS, COMPLEX BEHAVIOR. “Even two lines of code can evolve complexity. "Galileo moment. I’d seen something through my computational telescope that eventually made me change my whole world view. And made me realize that computation—even as done by a tiny program like the one here—is vastly more powerful and important than I’d ever imagined." http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2013/03/talking-about-the-computational-future-at-sxsw-2013/ View in LinkedIn

CODING IN NATURE. "What kind of programs might nature use? Given how complicated the things we see in nature are, we might think the programs it’s running must be really complicated. Maybe thousands or millions of lines of code. Like programs we write to do things." https://lnkd.in/d_xQqPE View in LinkedIn