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ACCUMULATING COMPLEXITY. "For if there is any purpose legible at all in the millennia of human history, it is in the unflagging persistence with which we add to the complexity of the universe." Except viruses which devolve from complexity to simplicity. The story is a bit more complicated than the simple ascent to complexity. https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

AGRICULTURAL MONOCULTURE is very susceptible to catastrophic viral collapse. "FAO estimates that since the beginning of this century about 75 percent of the genetic diversity of agricultural crops has been lost. We are becoming increasingly dependent on fewer and fewer crop varieties and, as a result, a rapidly diminishing gene pool." https://lnkd.in/d_bBGHi View in LinkedIn

EMERGENCE. "Stephen Wolfram was so astonished when he discovered how very complicated results could be obtained with very simple rules that he began a thorough research in the 1980s then published "A New Kind of Science" in 2002. He emphasizes notably the power of CA to experiment on emergence: the apparition of complexity or order, out of simple systems." https://lnkd.in/dN7T9ZC View in LinkedIn

COMPUTER MONOCULTURE. "Today, our computing infrastructure is more vulnerable than ever before due to a convergence of four key factors. First, the world population of computers is more homogeneous than ever before, creating a computing “monoculture;” if one machine is susceptible to a bug, the rest are too. Second, our computing systems are more connected than ever before, enabling a fast spreading virus to rapidly infect millions of machines. Essentially, each of our desktops have a genetically similar software and hardware makeup." https://lnkd.in/eV_mmFn View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this second of three weekends dedicated to plant clocks. The last weekend shows how the clocks are used to control flowering. The sheer diversity of plant solutions, the modulations on a theme, and the use of quite different molecular strategies to solve clock issues is an Exemplar of the sophistication of these strange creatures called plants, that we still barely understand. View in LinkedIn

SIMPLISTIC. "The ‘Hello World’ program analogy is inadequate for the task of modeling naturalistic evolutionary theory, it is way too simplistic." https://lnkd.in/dZqxxrU View in LinkedIn

PLANETARY EVIDENCE. "What is the chance of producing, by random mutation and natural selection, the digital computer program that is the DNA molecule, not to mention the protein synthesis machinery and information-processing mechanism, all of which is mutually interdependent for function and survival?" https://lnkd.in/dZqxxrU View in LinkedIn

CONTRARIAN. "Writing Computer Programs by Random Mutation and Natural Selection. What is the probability of arriving at our Hello World program by random mutation and natural selection? The unfathomable probabilistic hurdles that must be overcome to produce the simplest of all computer programs by Darwinian mechanisms." https://lnkd.in/dZqxxrU View in LinkedIn

VIRAL MUTATION. "There are plentiful opportunities for data corruption in the modern computing environment. Faults in hardware or on storage media itself can lead to new bit patterns, and hence new instructions, in programs. Faulty software can overwrite either code or result in the creation of stray pieces of orphan code." (Page 50). https://lnkd.in/etkXtU6 View in LinkedIn

AUTONOMOUS CODE. "I’ve been really into code mutation and getting computers to write their own code, well at least that’s the goal anyway. What really interests me is if you can give a computer a really small amount of code but yet get it to construct something itself." https://lnkd.in/e2GhRte View in LinkedIn