ABSTRACTABLE LOGIC. "Stripped of bone and sinew, leaf and petal, ribosome and chromosome, life still has a unique logic that can be abstracted in a computer." https://lnkd.in/d8uZSVQ View in LinkedIn
RICHARD DAWKINS, on artificial life. "It's not a substance; there's no living material. It's just an incidental fact that in real living things the entities that happen to be organized happen to be made of organic, soft, squishy stuff, whereas in a computer they're made of hard, nonmoving chips.'' https://lnkd.in/d8uZSVQ View in LinkedIn
VIRTUAL MENAGERIE. "The creatures of artificial life already make up a strange menagerie. There are flocking birds and schooling fish just a few generations removed from the cartoons of Walt Disney. Invisible bugs breed and die out as they leave trails through a mound of electronic food. Computer flowers bud and unfold, their timing controlled by computer chemicals running up and down computer stems. Stick-figure shapes evolve in a few dozen generations into startling butterflies and shellfish." https://lnkd.in/d8uZSVQ View in LinkedIn
"UNGUIDED EVOLUTION is a philosophical extension to the scientific theory of evolution. It is the idea that evolution is guided by one simple principle — living long enough to reproduce; that neither nature nor the process of evolution and natural selection are partial to what reproduces or how; that there is no ultimate form of life that is the "target" of all this reproduction, mutation, and selection." https://lnkd.in/dZQjh64 View in LinkedIn
THE BOTTLENECK. "As fascinating as these robots are, they're designed by people. By engineers sitting at a desk, deciding how pieces should go together...Often, we humans are the bottleneck. We can't create such a rich diversity as evolution can." https://lnkd.in/dtVFGBG View in LinkedIn
CONSERVED BODY PLANS. "Higher taxonomic groups, most notably phyla, poses suites of anatomical features that distinguish them from other groups. Such an underlying anatomical arrangement is called a body plan. Body plans arose rapidly during the radiation of the first animals but have been conserved since their first debut." https://lnkd.in/d2_xbfe View in LinkedIn
ANCIENT BODY PATTERNS. “The basic animal body plans are half a billion years old. Arthropods, chordates, mollusks, echinoderms and others can all be recognized from the first appearance of the animal fossil record. Even so, the striking diversity of living animals shows that dramatic evolutionary transformations have taken place within these ancient patterns." https://lnkd.in/d2_xbfe View in LinkedIn
CONTROL HOMOLOGIES. "One of the most remarkable discoveries of the past few years is that the major elements controlling animal development are quite similar across a wide range of body plans." https://lnkd.in/dx4KvtT View in LinkedIn
STRUCTURAL HOMOLOGIES. "The early formation of distinct germ layers, the establishment of body axes, the differentiation of photoreceptors or the deployment of similar neuronal architectures are examples attesting to deep homologies at the tissue and cellular level." https://lnkd.in/dT-s3Z5 View in LinkedIn