Month: September 2022

SO ENDS this section on flatfish asymmetry. It is an exemplar of great biochemistry and great genetics to explain phenotype. It is an axiom in many biochemistry labs that you should only work on species that are edible when the experiments are over. Julia Child famously said that French cooked Dover sole was her favorite dish. Perhaps this did not impede these fabulous studies on the very quirky and very delicious flatfish. View in LinkedIn

EMERGENCE FEATURES: “Goldstein identifies five essential features of emergence:" "1. Radical novelty—novel behaviour occurs that cannot be predicted." "2. Coherence or correlation—the novel behaviour has some level of coherence over time." "3. Global or macro-level behaviour—coherence occurs at the macro level." "4. Dynamical—the macro-level, while having some coherence in time, also evolves over time." "5. Ostensive—emergent behaviours are recognised ostensively, i.e. by showing themselves.” https://lnkd.in/dRvnSMk View in LinkedIn

EMERGENCE ADVANTAGES:" "1. “The first of these advantages is simplicity: individual agents tend to be quite simple, yet together they can produce very complicated behaviour." "2. The second is robustness: swarming systems are able to continue to operate, albeit at a lower performance, even though there are failures in some individuals or disturbances in the environment.” https://lnkd.in/dRvnSMk View in LinkedIn

EMERGENCE ADVANTAGES: " "3. “The third is flexibility: the system is self-adjusting, able to adapt quickly to changing circumstances without changing individual agents’ behaviour" "4. The fourth is scalability: the swarm can operate using different swarm sizes with little if any change to coordination mechanisms. " "5. The sixth is parallelism: swarm intelligence systems inherently use parallel computation for problem solving.” https://lnkd.in/dRvnSMk View in LinkedIn

EMERGENCE PROBLEMS. “The emergent behaviour of swarm intelligence systems can also be a ‘curse’ in some complex problem solving situations:" "1. The first of these limitations is the challenge of predicting the behaviour of swarm intelligence systems. " "2. The second limitation, and closely related to that of unpredictability, is the inability to control the behaviour of swarm intelligence systems" "3. The third major limitation of swarm intelligence systems relates to the time required to reach a solution, which may limit the usefulness of swarm intelligence systems for on-line control tasks and time-critical tasks.” https://lnkd.in/dRvnSMk View in LinkedIn

DNA MUTATION RATES. "Real time experiments have shown that average mitochondrial genome mutation rates are around 6 x 10-8 mut/site/mitochondrial generation - in line with various estimates of average bacterial mutation rates (Compare with nDNA rate of 4.4 x 10-8 mut/site/human generation). With an average generation time of 45 days, that's about 5 x 10-6 mut/site/year and 5 mut/site/myr." https://lnkd.in/dSzSV3z View in LinkedIn

EUKARYOTIC MUTATION RATE. "The average mutation rate for eukaryotes in general was, until fairly recently, estimated to be about 2.2 x 10-9 mutations per base pair per year. With a 20 year average generation time for humans, this works out to be around 4.4 x 10-8 mutations per base pair per generation." https://lnkd.in/dSzSV3z View in LinkedIn

EXACTLY PUT. "Since most estimates of the size of the diploid human genome run around 6.3 billion base pairs, this mutation rate would give the average child around 277 mutational differences from his or her parents." https://lnkd.in/dSzSV3z View in LinkedIn

DUPLICATE EXACTNESS. "From cell division to cell division, the error rate for DNA polymerase combined with other repair enzymes is about 1 mistake in 1 billion base pairs copied. At this rate, there are about 6 mistakes with each diploid cell replication event. With a male/female average of 29 mitotic divisions before the production of the next generation, this works out to be about 175 mutations per generation." https://lnkd.in/dSzSV3z View in LinkedIn

IT ONLY TAKES ONE MUTATION to cause lethal diseases in the worst case. Equally, generic variation can add to fitness. 175 mutations per generation is a game of Russian Roulette. https://lnkd.in/dSzSV3z View in LinkedIn