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JUMPING GENES. “Several key players that organise the genetic content compositions of host organisms such as, e.g., endogenous viruses and its defectives, transposons, retrotransposons, LTRs (long terminal repeats), non-LTRs (non-long terminal repeats), LINEs (long interspersed nuclear elements), SINEs (short interspersed nuclear elements), ALUs, group I introns, group II introns, phages, plasmids.” https://lnkd.in/dWwkKpD View in LinkedIn

EXTERNAL VARIATION. “Key roles now act as non-random genetic change operators in the production of complex evolutionary inventions.” https://lnkd.in/dWwkKpD View in LinkedIn

MINOR ROLE OF MUTATION. “In contrast to the decades long assumption that the driving forces of evolution were chance mutation (statistical replication errors) and selection it is now recognised that although mutation is an empirical fact it does not contribute very much to genetic novelty.” https://lnkd.in/dWwkKpD View in LinkedIn

TWO WAY READING. “The change from a read-only-memory genome with copying errors to a read-and-write genome with active change operators is fundamental.” https://lnkd.in/dWwkKpD View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE continues from last weekend and concludes this weekend on the linguistic perspective on contextual genetics and the controversial idea of the significant impact of mobile genetic elements on evolution, from an essay by Günther Witzany. Biologists as a group tend to fiercely resist new ideas and be locked into arcane outmoded ideas, and the poor acceptance of the enormous impact of mobile genetic elements on evolution is a poster-child example, not to mention the truly Luddite proposition that these kinds of elements (and viruses) are not alive, simply because they stuck to wrong definitions of life. View in LinkedIn

AHEAD OF THE CURVE. “Let us all raise a glass to AlphaGo and mark another big moment in the advance of artificial intelligence and then perhaps start to worry. AlphaGo, Google DeepMind’s game of Go-playing AI just bested the best Go-playing human currently alive, the renowned Lee Sedol. This was not supposed to happen. At least, not for a while. An artificial intelligence capable of beating the best humans at the game was predicted to be 10 years away.” https://lnkd.in/dyZMbSC View in LinkedIn

CHAMPION. “DeepMind’s stunning victories over Go legend Lee Se-dol have stoked excitement over artificial intelligence’s potential more than any event in recent memory. But the Google subsidiary’s AlphaGo program is far from its only project — it’s not even the main one.” https://lnkd.in/dT88xiV View in LinkedIn

MACHINE INTUITION. “Monte Carlo tree search was a big innovation ten years ago, but I think what we’ve done with AlphaGo is introduce with the neural networks this aspect of intuition, if you want to call it that, and that’s really the thing that separates out top Go players: their intuition.” https://lnkd.in/dT88xiV View in LinkedIn

OLYMPIC. “I think for perfect information games, Go is the pinnacle.” https://lnkd.in/dT88xiV View in LinkedIn