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ABILITY TO PREDICT. “One way of ensuring long-term survival is to use information about the current environment to predict possible future environments and generate responses that maximize the chance of survival and reproduction. This process is a computation, in which the inputs are environmental measurements, the outputs are signals that modulate behaviour, and the rules generate the outputs from the environmental inputs.For example, signals from the environment entrain circadian biological clocks to produce responses to predicted fluctuations in light intensity and temperature.” https://www.nature.com/articles/35011540 View in LinkedIn

MORE ENGINEERING DEVICES. “Coincidence detection systems require two or more events to occur simultaneously in order to activate an output. Amplifiers are built to minimize noise relative to signal, for instance by choosing appropriate time constants for the circuits. Parallel circuits (fail-safe systems) allow an electronic device to survive failures in one of the circuits.” https://www.nature.com/articles/35011540 View in LinkedIn

ENGINEERING TRICKS. “A number of the design principles of biological systems are familiar to engineers. Positive feedback loops can drive rapid transitions between two different stable states of a system, and negative feedback loops can maintain an output parameter within a narrow range, despite widely fluctuating input.” https://www.nature.com/articles/35011540 View in LinkedIn

HUMPTY DUMPTY. “It is thus unlikely that we can deduce the circuity or a higher-level description of a module solely from genome-wide information about gene expression and physical interactions between proteins. Solving this problem is likely to require additional types of information and finding general principles that govern the structure and function of modules.” https://www.nature.com/articles/35011540 View in LinkedIn

CIRCUITRY ANALOGY. “Just as electrical engineers design circuits to perform specific functions, modules have evolved to perform biological functions. The properties of a module's components and molecular connections between them are analogous to the circuit diagram of an electrical device. As biologists we often try to deduce the circuitry of modules by listing their component parts and determining how changing the input of the module affects its output.” https://www.nature.com/articles/35011540 View in LinkedIn

NOVEL DEVICES IN BIOLOGY. “Other aspects of functional modules are less familiar to engineers. Several can be subsumed under the idea that the rules for a module's function are rigidly encoded in the structures of its proteins, but produce messy, probabilistic intermediates that are then refined to give unique solutions. This principle seems to hold across an enormous range of scales, from the folding of protein molecules to the evolution of organisms.” https://www.nature.com/articles/35011540 View in LinkedIn

EXPLOITING NOISE. “Many systems for specifying the polarity of cells or groups of cells rely on a mechanism known as ‘lateral inhibition’, which causes adjacent cells to follow different fates. This process can amplify a small, often stochastic, initial asymmetry causing adjacent cells or adjacent areas within cells to follow different fates.” https://www.nature.com/articles/35011540 View in LinkedIn

THE LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE. “We already know the laws that govern the behavior of matter under all but the most extreme conditions.” (Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, page 168.) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Brief_History_of_Time View in LinkedIn

CONTROL OF NOISE. “Biological systems can both resist and exploit random fluctuations, or noise. Thus, evolutionary adaptation depends on DNA being mutable, but because most mutations are neutral or deleterious, the rate of mutation is under rigorous genetic control.” https://www.nature.com/articles/35011540 View in LinkedIn