Category: Uncategorized

ANALOG CHEMISTRY. "The proteome, and in fact nearly all biochemical interactions in the cell, processes information in an analogue format, i.e. through chemical reactions which rely on continuous rates." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

TOP DOWN CONTROL. "DNA does not contain a blueprint for building the entire cell, but instead contains only small parts of a much larger biological algorithm, which may be roughly described as the distributed ‘top-down’ control of an organism." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

LIFE AS AUTOMATA. "From the insights provided by molecular biology over the past 50 years, we can now identify that all known life functions in a manner akin to von Neumann automata, where DNA provides an (partial) algorithm, ribosomes act as the core of the UC and DNA polymerases (along with a suite of other molecular machinery) play the role of a supervisory unit." (UC = universal constructor of von Neumann). http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

DECOUPLING. "It is this transition where one should expect to see a chemical system literally take-on ‘a life of its own’, characterized by informational dynamics which become decoupled from the dictates of local chemistry alone (while of course remaining fully consistent with those dictates)." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

INSUFFICIENT. "Explaining the chemical substrate of life and claiming it as a solution to life's origin is like pointing to silicon and copper as an explanation for the goings-on inside a computer." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

HARDWARE PLUS SOFTWARE. "In our view, an explanation of life's origin is fundamentally incomplete in the absence of an account of how the unique causal role played by information in living systems first emerged. In other words, we need to explain the origin of both the hardware and software aspects of life, or the job is only half finished." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

AUGMENTED ANALOG SYSTEM. "This is another way of stating, in informational terms, that analogue-only systems are not as versatile or as robust as analogue systems with digital information control and as such may probably have very limited evolutionary capacity." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

HYBRID SYSTEMS. "It is clear that analogue-only systems are not capable of adaptation in the same way as living systems are. Modern life is a hybrid: digital memory and digital switches enable control over many (non-interfering) analogue states, and therefore enable adaptability to changing environmental conditions with the same basic toolkit." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

DIGITAL SWITCHES. "Orthogonality is, by comparison, relatively easy to achieve with digitized switches. Control is therefore much easier to achieve in an analogue system with digital switches than in a solely analogue system." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

UNIVERSALITY IS DIGITAL. "All known life achieves universality (at least in a limited sense) by using the digital sequence structure of informational polymers. Such universality would be exceedingly difficult to engineer in an analogue-only system given the challenges associated with building reaction networks where each (programmed) reaction is chemically orthogonal to all other reactions." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn