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LATENT POTENTIAL. "We show that when we require such networks to be viable on one particular carbon source, they are typically also viable on multiple other carbon sources that were not targets of selection. For example, viability on glucose may entail viability on up to 44 other sole carbon sources. Any one adaptation in these metabolic systems typically entails multiple potential exaptations. Metabolic systems thus contain a latent potential for evolutionary innovations with non-adaptive origins." https://lnkd.in/dqbbJy3 View in LinkedIn

EVOLUTIONARY INNOVATIONS. "Some evolutionary innovations may originate non-adaptively as exaptations, or pre-adaptations, which are by-products of other adaptive traits. Examples include feathers, which originated before they were used in flight, and lens crystallins, which are light-refracting proteins that originated as enzymes." https://lnkd.in/dqbbJy3 View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE for the next two weekends considers the evolution of metabolic pathways. A functional cellular metabolism is arguably the test of whether genetics is actually working. And cellular metabolism has turned out to be remarkably intricate and complex. It is hard to imagine how this evolved by trial-and-error adaptations, even given aeons of time. But redundancies and futile cycles give some clues about its chaotic construction. View in LinkedIn

VON NEUMANN'S CREATURE. "For decades von Neumann's virtual creature was reviewed, criticized and reworked, but still no one actually attempted to implement an artificial creature able to reproduce itself. Chris Langton, took it upon himself to create a creature that fulfilled Von Neumann's criteria of reproduction." https://lnkd.in/dSdcD2A View in LinkedIn

COMPLEXITY AND INFORMATION. "Around 1950 mathematicians and computer scientists began studying artificial self replicating systems in order to gain a deeper understanding of complex systems and the fundamental information processing principles involved in self replication." https://lnkd.in/dAx3RM7 View in LinkedIn

EPIGENETIC RESPONSES. "Pargellis envisages chips with simple instruction sets, whose programs dynamically mutate in response to environmental stimuli." https://lnkd.in/dJPTA3e View in LinkedIn

SIMPLIFYING EFFICIENCY. "Pargellis found that on average, a self-replicating sequence of instructions would spontaneously arise after about 400 generations. Initially, such 'self-reps' were often unnecessarily complex, and contained portions of code which performed no useful task, or were skipped over. This is directly analagous to the 'introns' and 'exons' found in real biological genes, where useful genetic information is interspersed with patches of nonsense." https://lnkd.in/dJPTA3e View in LinkedIn

SIMPLICITY AND ABUNDANCE. "One reason for Amoeba's fecundity is that its life-forms have a simple structure. Pergellis has carefully designed his instruction set such that it is possible to create a self-replicating cell with only 5 instructions." https://lnkd.in/dJPTA3e View in LinkedIn

FINITE SIZE RANGE. "Proteins exist in a finite range of sizes with a limited amino acid alphabet. We find that these restrictions set an intrinsic limit to designing protein interfaces that can bind selectively to target proteins, while remaining relatively repulsive to all other protein interfaces." https://lnkd.in/eTyvTV7 View in LinkedIn

GENE SWAPS. "The horizontal transfer of entire metabolic pathways or part thereof might have had a special role during the early stages of cellular evolution." https://lnkd.in/dxwrfTm View in LinkedIn