Month: September 2022

MULTI-CELLULAR ORGANIZATION ON THE NET. "Dyson argued that "turning this into a political issue-Government versus Microsoft-is diverting attention from something much more significant: the growth of multi-cellular forms of organization on the Net." https://lnkd.in/dVwXzv5 View in LinkedIn

PREBIOTIC SOUP. "The analogy with biological organisms is highly tenuous—as Edge readers will be flooding your inbox to point out. It's just the beginnings of something, in a faintly metazoan sense. The operating system used to be the system that operated a computer. Now it is becoming something else." https://lnkd.in/dVwXzv5 View in LinkedIn

DNA AS SOFTWARE. "DNA is the software of the cell, and when we change the software we change the species." (J Craig Venter). https://lnkd.in/eJFrT_P View in LinkedIn

THE DIGITAL AGE OF BIOLOGY. "This is now the era of digital biology, in which the proteins and other interacting molecules in a cell can be viewed as its hardware and the information encoded in its DNA as its software." (Craig Venter). https://lnkd.in/eyZU783 View in LinkedIn

ANALOGY WITH LIFE IS CLOSER. "What has changed in the past fourteen years is that the analogy with biological organisms is no longer highly tenuous." (George Dyson). https://lnkd.in/dVwXzv5 View in LinkedIn

DIRECTING EVOLUTION. "In the past year or so, researchers have discovered that the bacterial system can be harnessed to make precise changes to the DNA of humans, as well as other animals and plants. This means a genome can be edited, much as a writer might change words or fix spelling errors. It allows “customizing the genome of any cell or any species at will." https://lnkd.in/dC-NM-E View in LinkedIn

LIVING OS. "Now, there are moves afoot to get the same code-Windows, or Windows CE, or Windows NT or whatever, not to mention underlying protocols-running everywhere. The thing is, it's happening. Which is very much what's gone on in the world of biology. In biology there is one operating system, and it's the one we're stuck with-the DNA/RNA operating system. All living organisms, with very rare exceptions, run that same system." https://lnkd.in/dVwXzv5 View in LinkedIn

ANALOGY WITH LIFE IS CLOSER. "What has changed in the past fourteen years is that the analogy with biological organisms is no longer highly tenuous." (George Dyson). https://lnkd.in/dVwXzv5 View in LinkedIn

REPLICATION, VARIATION, FITNESS. "Evolution as a process requires the presence of three simple elements: replication, variation and differential fitness. Replication allows for inheritance, and in particular the inheritance of variations, introduced by different mechanisms of mutation. These variations are then selected for or against via the competition of individuals over limited resources. The competition leads to differential fitness." Don't forget some reproductive isolation by speciation. https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

THE CONCEPT OF SPECIATION, a central part of evolution troubled by an unsolved definition, is in fact solved by thinking of variants or strains instead of species, instead of the idea of an immutable species with a clear species barrier. View in LinkedIn