Category: Uncategorized

THE ONION QUESTION. "Why does an onion require five times more of it (the genome) than a human?” https://lnkd.in/eT5V5Xc View in LinkedIn

LET FREE. "Once loosed into the Tierra environment installed on Ray's laptop, the creature's offspring quickly spread to the new world's every corner, within minutes displaying the evolutionary transformations that would "write" Ray's organisms from then on." https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

NOT A SIMPLE CORRELATION. "The relationship between genomic complexity and the complexity at various levels of the phenotype, from molecular to organismal, is far from being straightforward as it has become clear already in the pre-genomic era." Some relatively simple creatures have much greater genomic complexity than more complex creatures. https://lnkd.in/egqWFZp View in LinkedIn

THE START. "Primed to carry out the requisite natural selections, Ray's digital ecosphere was nearly complete. He called it Tierra (Spanish for "earth") and started preparing the final touch: an inhabitant. Later dubbed "the Ancestor," it was the first worm Tom Ray ever created – an 80-byte-long self-replicating machine written in Tierra's quirky assembly language – and as it happens, it was also the last." https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

GENOME COMPLEXITY ISSUES. "Despite recent developments in genomics it remains unclear why gene content, chromosome number, and genome size vary independently of each other. Is there a tendency for genome size or chromosome number to increase or decrease over time? Does genome size or chromosome number have an adaptive value and, if so, what is that value?" https://lnkd.in/dsqiJD5 View in LinkedIn

INCREASING GENOMIC COMPLEXITY. "Complete genomic sequences from diverse phylogenetic lineages reveal notable increases in genome complexity from prokaryotes to multicellular eukaryotes. The changes include gradual increases in gene number, resulting from the retention of duplicate genes, and more abrupt increases in the abundance of spliceosomal introns and mobile genetic elements." https://lnkd.in/dsqiJD5 View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE ruminates on whether there is any evidence that nature operates primarily to increase genetic information. This question is more accessible today due to the large amount of data incoming on sequencing genomes of many taxa, and although very, very, far from complete, early indications give some clues to this question. View in LinkedIn

SIMPLE BREEDS COMPLEX. "It is also instructive to observe how little code is required to achieve seemingly complex strategies. The progenitor organism in Tierra used 80 instructions." https://lnkd.in/g5hUBjg View in LinkedIn

GROWING COMPLEXITY. "Given that the instructions and operations of the organisms are those of a simple von Neumann assembly language, the ecologies can be seen as a model of viral evolution, indicating that given sufficient time there is no barrier to viruses spontaneously developing sophisticated behaviour." https://lnkd.in/g5hUBjg View in LinkedIn

TIERRA. "The electronic ecologies that eventuated were astounding. The instruction sequences that serve as "organism" analogues spontaneously developed sophisticated behaviours. Among these were complex patterns in memory, flocking, parasitism and immunity, predator-prey relationships and sexual reproduction." https://lnkd.in/g5hUBjg View in LinkedIn