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WHY SO COMPLEX? "Metabolic pathways may seem arbitrary and unnecessarily complex. In many cases, a chemist might devise a simpler route for the biochemical transformation, so why has nature chosen such complex solutions?" https://lnkd.in/dvz872D View in LinkedIn

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

GREATER THAN THE SUM. "The hallmark of these systems is that...they are not fully explained by an understanding of their component parts, i.e., they seem not to be readily analyzed by reductionist processes." https://lnkd.in/dEpJBda View in LinkedIn

BIODULE. "The embryonics team developed an artificial cell, dubbed biodule (biological module), that is used as an elementary unit from which multicellular organisms can ontogenetically develop to perform useful tasks. Cellular differentiation takes place by having each cell compute its coordinates (i.e., position) within a one- or two-dimensional space, after which it can extract the specific gene within the artificial genome responsible for the cell's functionality." https://lnkd.in/dn83zJW View in LinkedIn

TENDENCY TO DISORDER. "Information theory showed that entropy and information are inversely related such that an increase in information is equivalent to a decrease in entropy. Thus, the agents of information (in our case, natural products) are employed by nature to overcome the natural tendency toward disorder, and, fueled by the energy from the sun, or other less common sources of energy here on earth, these small molecules have become indispensable for life on this planet." https://lnkd.in/dEpJBda View in LinkedIn

"THE EMBRYONICS (embryonic electronics) project is a joint collaboration between the Logic Systems Laboratory and the Centre Suisse d'Electronique et de Microtechnique SA. The ultimate objective is the construction of large-scale integrated circuits, exhibiting properties such as self-repair (healing), self-replication, and evolution, found up until now only in living beings." https://lnkd.in/dn83zJW View in LinkedIn

"STRUCTURES that self-organize (crystals, double helical DNA, etc) do so because of compensating energy factors (e.g. favorable intramolecular attractions such as hydrogen bonding); whereas, systems that appear to "spontaneously" self organize (e.g. life) may well involve self-ordering components but also require an external source of energy to compensate for unfavorable entropy." https://lnkd.in/dEpJBda View in LinkedIn