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PERPLEXING. "Dr. Thompson peered inside his perfect offspring to gain insight into its methods, but what he found inside was baffling. The plucky chip was utilizing only thirty-seven of its one hundred logic gates, and most of them were arranged in a curious collection of feedback loops." https://lnkd.in/e5p4fXs View in LinkedIn

POLY-FUNCTIONAL DNA. "Multiple Overlapping Genetic Codes Profoundly Reduce the Probability of Beneficial Mutation. There is growing evidence that much of the DNA in higher genomes is poly-functional, with the same nucleotide contributing to more than one type of code. Such poly-functional DNA should logically be multiply-constrained in terms of the probability of sequence improvement via random mutation." https://lnkd.in/d2ZFuRp View in LinkedIn

EMERGENT PHENOMENA IN SILICO. "Finally, after just over 4,000 generations, test system settled upon the best program. As predicted, the principle of natural selection could successfully produce specialized circuits using a fraction of the resources a human would have required. And no one had the foggiest notion how it worked." https://lnkd.in/e5p4fXs View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this first of two weekends on coevolution. It seems intuitive that two interdependent creatures could affect each others evolutionary trajectory. Thus the continuity of the germplasm into the future — that driver of life — is not simply affected by successful mating and gene reshuffling, but by what type of company you keep, wittingly or not. This includes the microbiome of multiple creatures in and on your body. This is an exemplar of Darwin’s tangled bank seen through the lens of time, dynamic and active. View in LinkedIn

DIGITAL PRIMORDIAL SOUP. "He cooked up a batch of primordial data-soup by generating fifty random blobs of ones and zeros. One by one his computer loaded these digital genomes into the FPGA chip, played the two distinct audio tones, and rated each genome’s fitness according to how closely its output satisfied pre-set criteria. Occasional mutations were introduced into the fruit of their digital loins when the control program randomly changed a one or a zero here and there." https://lnkd.in/e5p4fXs View in LinkedIn

"HARDWARE EVOLUTION. The concept is roughly analogous to Charles Darwin’s elegant principle of natural selection, which describes how individuals with the most advantageous traits are more likely to survive and reproduce. This process tends to preserve favorable characteristics by passing them to the survivors’ descendants, while simultaneously suppressing the spread of less-useful traits." https://lnkd.in/e5p4fXs View in LinkedIn

SILICON EVOLUTION. "As predicted, with each breeding cycle the offspring evolved slightly, nudging the population incrementally closer to the computer’s pre-programmed definition of the perfect individual. The candidates in question were not the stuff of blood, guts, and chromosomes that are normally associated with evolution, rather they were clumps of ones and zeros residing within a specialized computer chip. As these primitive bodies of data bumped together in their silicon logic cells." https://lnkd.in/e5p4fXs View in LinkedIn

FORCED EVOLUTION. "A computer carefully scrutinized every member of large and diverse set of candidates. Each was evaluated dispassionately, and assigned a numeric score according to a strict set of criteria. This machine’s task was to single out the best possible pairings from the group, then force the selected couples to mate so that it might extract the resulting offspring and repeat the process with the following generation." https://lnkd.in/e5p4fXs View in LinkedIn

DIGITAL AND CHEMICAL. "Secondly, blocks of data are stored at the beginning or end of the file, while the primary instructions occupy the middle of the file. This creates the same organization pattern observed in human chromosomes where repetitive sequences are grouped near the telomeres and centromeres." https://lnkd.in/de9z-Pn View in LinkedIn

CODE AND CHROMOSOMES. "Executable code shows the same large scale organization as chromosomes. Firstly, changing bias between the use of 1’s and 0’s creates the same distribution pattern as isochores alternating between A/T and G/C bias." https://lnkd.in/de9z-Pn View in LinkedIn