Category: Uncategorized

FRESH VARIATION. "Most commonly, a single base is substituted for another. Sometimes a base is deleted or an extra base is added. Fortunately, the cell is able to repair most of these changes. When a DNA change remains unrepaired in a cell that will become an egg or a sperm, it is passed down to offspring. Thanks to mutation, we all have some new variations that were not present in our parents." https://lnkd.in/d9VF6RH View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this brief peek into the topic of the improbability of evolution and the emergence of life. This is a bone that many dogs have chewed in, both within science and within philosophy and beyond, because it is a core issue, central to the whole question of biology. Kicking the can into panspermia, life arising beyond earth, simply delays the core question, it does not do away with it. View in LinkedIn

DATA INCREASE. "Since the genetic information is transformed into phenotypic information in ontogeny, this figure (10(8) bits) must represent the amount of information which corresponds to the improved organization of higher animals as compared to their ancestors 500 million years back." https://lnkd.in/eGfBzxS View in LinkedIn

INFORMATION INCREASE. "If we express this complexity in terms of its improbability, defining the amount of genetic information as the negative logarithm of its probability of occurrence by chance, we may say that genetic information is increased in the course of progressive evolution, guided by natural selection of random mutations." https://lnkd.in/eGfBzxS View in LinkedIn

THE LOGIC. "In the course of evolution, complicated organisms have descended from much simpler ones. Since the instructions to form an organism are contained in the nucleus of its fertilized egg, this means that the genetic constitution has become correspondingly more complex in evolution." https://lnkd.in/eGfBzxS View in LinkedIn

DEEMED UNLIKELY (TODAY). "Spafford performed an exhaustive review of computer viruses under the Artificial Life perspective confirming the absence of functional evolution in such programs. Although the possibility of an autonomously evolving virus—as the one discussed here—was mentioned, it was quickly dismissed as a task too daunting requiring a very large implementation, possibly larger than the OS itself." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

PROGRAMMED MUTATION. "Somatic hypermutation involves a programmed process of mutation affecting the variable regions of immunoglobulin genes. Unlike germline mutation, SHM affects only an organism's individual immune cells, and the mutations are not transmitted to the organism's offspring." https://lnkd.in/dZFtBek View in LinkedIn

AUTONOMOUS MALWARE. "Alife systems also differ in that they implement simulated environments where specific program behaviors are rewarded. While this setting is very different from the standard computer malware paradigm, computer virus researchers hinted at the idea of autonomously evolving malware already in the early 1990s." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

FRAGILE DIGITAL CODE. "In these systems, the code is implemented with small, well-defined instruction sets that are highly evolvable, that is, the probability that a mutation leads to another functional program is high (of the order of several to tens of percents). Most standard computer languages are not robust in this manner. For example, the x86 instruction set only tolerates very few mutations (on the order of fractions of a percent of the code." That applies to today. Not tomorrow. https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

DARWINIAN MALWARE. "More recent systems such as the Avida platform have established that Darwinian evolution of computer programs can be used to study evolutionary biology and genetics." Imagine if this was available to malware. https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn