Category: Uncategorized

COMMON VIEW. “The Darwinian mantra broadly holds that, other than the exigencies of the death of Solar Systems (and yet more distant catastrophes) evolution is both indeterminate and open-ended, with the widespread view that it is unpredictable and the implicit (albeit largely un-examined) assumption that there is no limit to its complexity.” https://lnkd.in/euEN3Eh View in LinkedIn

AT THE HEART OF GENE EVOLUTION. “Transposons contribute to creating genes, modifying them, and programming and reprogramming them. Many transposons and retroelements contain captured gene fragments and can be part of gene regulatory regions.” http://science.sciencemag.org/content/338/6108/758 View in LinkedIn

NO PLAN. “It is commonplace that evolution has no fore-knowledge.” https://lnkd.in/euEN3Eh View in LinkedIn

UNDERSTATEMENT. “We need to be careful not to under-estimate the complexity of some “primitive” organisms.” https://lnkd.in/euEN3Eh View in LinkedIn

INTELLECTUAL SIMPLICITY. “The paradox is that although evolution has run out of things to do, in the case of knowledge and wisdom the exact reverse appears to be the case. Here we have not reached the end of complexity.” https://lnkd.in/euEN3Eh View in LinkedIn

LIMITS OF COMPLEXITY. “I present evidence that biological systems are near, and in some cases have reached, the limits of complexity. Such is evident from areas as diverse as extremophiles, nervous and sensory systems, enzymes such as Rubisco, complex symbioses and functional complexes such as teeth and arthropod tagmosis.” https://lnkd.in/euEN3Eh View in LinkedIn

THE KEY. “Non-coding RNA holds the key to development and evolution of complexity.” https://lnkd.in/dMrxDE5 View in LinkedIn

SHARED SCRIPT. “An organism's DNA thus is not only a “book” about the organism, but is also a book about the environment it lives in, including the species it co-evolves with. It is well known that not all of the symbols in an organism's DNA correspond to something. These sections, sometimes referred to as “junk-DNA,” usually consist of portions of the code that are unexpressed or untranslated (i.e., excised from the mRNA).” http://www.pnas.org/content/97/9/4463.full View in LinkedIn

INFORMATION IS PHYSICAL. “A key aspect of information theory is that information cannot exist in a vacuum; that is, information is physical. This statement implies that information must have an instantiation (be it ink on paper, bits in a computer's memory, or even the neurons in a brain). Furthermore, it also implies that information must be about something. Lines on a piece of paper, for example, are not inherently information until it is discovered that they correspond to something, such as (in the case of a map) to the relative location of local streets and buildings.” http://www.pnas.org/content/97/9/4463.full View in LinkedIn

COMPELLED COMPLEXITY. “We show that, because natural selection forces genomes to behave as a natural “Maxwell Demon,” within a fixed environment, genomic complexity is forced to increase.” http://www.pnas.org/content/97/9/4463.full View in LinkedIn