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ACTIONS NOT STRUCTURE. "It is the functionality of the expressed RNAs and proteins—not the bits—that is biologically important." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

JUST A MOLECULE. "The biologically relevant information stored in DNA therefore has very little to do with its specific chemical nature (beyond the fact that it is a digital linear polymer). The genetic material could just as easily be a different variety of nucleic acid (or a different molecule altogether), as recently experimentally confirmed." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

"DNA IS NOT A BLUEPRINT for an organism: no information is actively processed by DNA alone. Rather, DNA is a (mostly) passive repository for transcription of stored data into RNA, some (but by no means all) of which goes on to be translated into proteins." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this section on the structural evolution of the human foot. The smell of the catacombs of the great Natural History Museum on Cromwell Road in London pervades this work. Anatomists scrutinizing old and obscure samples in basements. True beautiful Victorian scholarship brought (somewhat) to the modern era. Bolt-on evolution is alive and well in the toolbox of Rube Goldberg. https://lnkd.in/eFVn57d View in LinkedIn

VARIED VESTIGIAL MYSCLE. "The plantaris muscle and tendon may be regarded as the vestigial remains of a primitive flexor muscle of the toes, which, originally continuous with the plantar aponeurosis, later was rendered discontinuous through intermediate attachment to the calcaneum. The plantaris muscle and its tendon are subject to considerable variation in both the points of origin and of insertion. In an examination of 150 lower extremities, the authors have encountered four types of insertion of the tendon." https://lnkd.in/ehfEQ7g View in LinkedIn

VESTIGIAL STRUCTURES OF THE FOOT. "In numerous mammalian taxa one or more toes have become vestigial. In numerous others, one or more toes are lost and the associated metatarsals are reduced to a vestigial state. Locomotor changes may have provided the selective pressure that drove the evolution of vestigiality in many mammalian skeletal structures." https://lnkd.in/eMd4h72 View in LinkedIn

CRITERIA. "The first criterion for vestigiality is that in comparison to its state in the sister groups the structure exhibits extreme reduction. The second criterion is that the structure has lost the specialized morphology that it exhibits in the sister groups. The third criterion is that the structure has lost a salient ancestral function." https://lnkd.in/eMd4h72 View in LinkedIn

GHOST IN THE MACHINE. "The algorithm itself is therefore highly delocalized, distributed inextricably throughout the very physical system whose dynamics it encodes." Elegant synthesis. http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

DIGITAL TO ANALOG. "Much of the information digitally stored in DNA must first be transcribed and translated before it becomes algorithmically meaningful in the context of the cell where it is then processed as analogue information through protein interaction networks." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

"THE ALGORITHM for building an organism is therefore not only stored in a linear digital sequence (tape), but also in the current state of the entire system (e.g. epigenetic factors such as the level of gene expression, post-translational modifications of proteins, methylation patterns, chromatin architecture, nucleosome distribution, cellular phenotype and environmental context)." https://lnkd.in/einZ2Fh View in LinkedIn