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SYNTHETIC LIFE. "Scientists in the US have succeeded in developing the first living cell to be controlled entirely by synthetic DNA. The researchers constructed a bacterium's "genetic software" and transplanted it into a host cell." https://lnkd.in/dHrNzFp View in LinkedIn

CREATIVE MACHINES LAB. "We explore novel autonomous systems that can design and make other machines – automatically. Our work is inspired from biology, as we seek new biological concepts for engineering and new engineering insights into biology." https://lnkd.in/dWxNW_q View in LinkedIn

VIRTUAL CREATURES. "At the bottom of the hierarchy are electronic polarities, where the material and operational join to create bits, the semiotic markers of one and zero. Logic gates structure signals into bits; compiler languages are built out of bit patterns; programming languages are created from compiler languages." https://lnkd.in/dWchfhd View in LinkedIn

NO SURPRISE. "Evolution dwarfs even the best team of engineers." https://lnkd.in/dtVFGBG View in LinkedIn

VIRTUAL CREATURES. "Even this simple world is complex enough to require three different modes of interrogation: what it is (the material); what it does (the operational); and what it means (the symbolic). Feedback loops connect the material, operational, and symbolic into an integrated, recursively structured hierarchy." https://lnkd.in/dWchfhd View in LinkedIn

COMMON BODY PLANS. "Animals greatly exemplify how enormous morphological diversity can arise through evolution. However, despite their profound variation in forms, there are clear commonalities in how animal body plans are built." https://lnkd.in/dT-s3Z5 View in LinkedIn

BURST OF CREATIVITY. "The question of how the morphological 'design' of the thirty-five or so animal phyla arose in a burst of creative evolutionary activity in the geologically distant past." https://lnkd.in/d-B5nwz View in LinkedIn

ONLY 36 PHYLA OF ANIMALS. "There are 36 recognized animal phyla, of which but nine (Mollusca, Porifera, Cnidaria, Platyhelminthes, Nematoda, Annelida, Arthropoda, Echinodermata, and Chordata) contain the vast majority of described, extant species. Body plan is one approach to defining phyla." https://lnkd.in/dWhEMWG View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE explores the morphological explosion in animal body plans half a billion years ago, in the Cambrian period, and why this has essentially ground to a halt. In the second part of this two weekend posting, there is a deeper exploration of the subject from a genetic perspective ensues. Extinctions are much easier to explain than a massive expansion in biological diversity that arrives quickly and flattens out. What were the reasons for both the emergence and end of massive diversification? View in LinkedIn

REALITY GAP. "We believe that if indeed artificial systems are to ultimately interact and integrate with reality, they cannot remain virtual; it is crucial that they cross the simulation±reality gap to learn, to evolve, and to affect the physical world directly. Eventually, the evolutionary process must accept feedback from the live performance of its products." https://lnkd.in/dJJ9HmD View in LinkedIn