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PHYSICAL LANGUAGE. “What we understand now is that nematodes use complex messages that consist of molecules put together in a modular fashion. They put together different chemical fragments depending on what they want to say." https://lnkd.in/eaB_YWn View in LinkedIn

PARADIGM SHIFT. “A species of small, transparent roundworms have a highly evolved language in which they combine chemical fragments to create precise molecular messages that control social behavior. In 2008, Schroeder and colleagues had discovered that nematodes use chemical signals as sexual attractants, which provided the first hint that nematodes use chemistry to communicate.” https://lnkd.in/eaB_YWn View in LinkedIn

MODULAR LANGUAGE. “Imagine how complicated our language would be if every word had to have its own unique symbol. You can get some sense of that from Asian languages; written Mandarin Chinese, for example, uses tens of thousands of picture-like characters. However, these characters mostly represent syllables, and still get combined and rearranged in order to form words. Combining and arranging letters or characters allows us to convey many different ideas from a limited set of elements.” https://lnkd.in/eQAQ5eZ View in LinkedIn

SMALL NUMBER OF LETTERS. “In human language, sequence and combination matter. The English alphabet, for example, has only 26 letters, which can be arranged into hundreds of thousands of words. Move just one letter in the word “words” from the back to the front, and you end up with “sword,” something completely different. And on the level of sentences, “Jill ate the chicken” means something very different from “The chicken ate Jill.” Yet those sentences use the same four words.” https://lnkd.in/eQAQ5eZ View in LinkedIn

MASSIVE BREAKTHROUGH. “It really does look like we’ve stumbled upon the letters or words of a universal nematode language, the syntax of which we don’t yet fully understand.” https://lnkd.in/eSwxdxj View in LinkedIn

DEAD CODE. "In computer programming, dead code is a section in the source code of a program which is executed but whose result is never used in any other computation. While the result of a dead computation may never be used, it may raise exceptions or affect some global state, thus removal of such code may change the output of the program and introduce unintended bugs." https://lnkd.in/eXb6z-z View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this first of two weekends on worm talk. It is becoming increasingly clear that what we assumed were simple creatures are far from simple. They organize complex societies, develop clever life strategies, mate and have community, based on conversations that we have been deaf to. This is true down to the supposedly simplest of creatures, bacteria and viruses. It is our superior attitude that makes us uncurious. View in LinkedIn

COMPUTER VIRUSES occupy the same type of Grey Zone in programming that biological viruses occupy in biology. Both defy mainstream thinking, and both challenge definitions of life defined by autonomy, reproduction and evolution. And both inform each other considerably in relation to optional its and available strategies. View in LinkedIn

POLYMORPHIC VIRUSES. "Indeed, they typify anagenetic evolutionary change: the sequential transformation within a population or species. Insofar as this is true, it is possible to speak of directional and disruptional selection, speciation, Hardy-Weinberg equivalence, Mendelian genetics, and myriad other evolutionary terms." https://lnkd.in/dGnhiwY View in LinkedIn

EVOLUTIONARY PROCESSES. "To put it bluntly, polymorphic computer viruses evolve. Contrary to various Artificial Life scholars, it is the opinion of this document that polymorphics undergo evolutionary processes once released into cyberspace." https://lnkd.in/dGnhiwY View in LinkedIn