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FRAGMENT FROM NATURE continues from last weekend on the evolution of the human foot as an example of the structural work-around that evolution imposed on development, and an illustration of the principle that nothing has been designed from scratch for its current purpose. While this theme is structural, it applies equally to every protein and genome. And every living mite on planet earth. View in LinkedIn

DISTINCTION. "Such a transition may be akin to more traditional physical transitions (e.g. thermodynamic phase transitions), with the crucial distinction that determining which phase (non-life or life) a given system is in requires dynamical information and therefore can only be inferred by identifying causal architecture." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

PHYSICAL TRANSITION. "Here, we propose that the emergence of life may correspond to a physical transition associated with a shift in the causal structure, where information gains direct and context-dependent causal efficacy over the matter in which it is instantiated." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

SUBTLE CHANGES. "The human foot is manifestly different from that of other primates but apart from simple overt differences, such as the lack of divergence of the hallux its distinctions are subtle and have proved difficult to pinpoint." https://lnkd.in/eC74CRQ View in LinkedIn

"FLOW OF INFORMATION from DNA to RNA and thence to protein is known as the Central Dogma of cell biology. This direction of flow has operated in all organisms since the last universal common ancestor." https://lnkd.in/eKjEK6c View in LinkedIn

PRE-ADAPTATION. "An affinity with other Primates, and particularly the great apes, is abundantly manifest and the unique human attributes are progressive modifications of functional complexes which were initially evolved for arboreal life; in this sense the arboreal foot was pre-adapted to the specialized structure required by terrestrial bipedal man." https://lnkd.in/eC74CRQ View in LinkedIn

DATA VS BREEDING. "The evolution of DNA separated replication and information storage functions from protein-translation functions and from catalytic activity." https://lnkd.in/eKjEK6c View in LinkedIn

INFORMATION AS A PROPERTY. "The central position of information in biology is not itself especially new or radical. What is often sidestepped, however, is the fact that in biological systems information is not merely a way to label states, but a property of the system." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

ACTIONS NOT STRUCTURE. "It is the functionality of the expressed RNAs and proteins—not the bits—that is biologically important." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

JUST A MOLECULE. "The biologically relevant information stored in DNA therefore has very little to do with its specific chemical nature (beyond the fact that it is a digital linear polymer). The genetic material could just as easily be a different variety of nucleic acid (or a different molecule altogether), as recently experimentally confirmed." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn