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NO COMPLACENCY. “If we are right the advent of artificial life is the greatest challenge facing humanity, an inevitability that we must shape and set in motion in the proper direction. If the future is to do justice to the nobler attributes of humanity then we must take positive action.” https://lnkd.in/dMvAeqz View in LinkedIn

CREATING OUR SUCCESSORS. “We now have the possibility to create cultural and biological diversity. With the advent of artificial life, we may be the first species to create its own successors.” https://lnkd.in/dMvAeqz View in LinkedIn

ARTIFICIAL LIFE FORMS. "At first, they will be quite unsophisticated, simple tools that we have built to satisfy our needs. Ultimately, however, economic and political pressures will drive artificial life forms to greater degrees of sophistication, until their complexity and information processing capabilities are comparable or superior to those of humans. This may engender competition with humans.” https://lnkd.in/dMvAeqz View in LinkedIn

LAMARCKIAN HARDWARE. “Assuming that artificial life forms become dominant in the far future, this transition to Lamarckian evolution of hardware will enact another major change in the global rate of evolution, comparable to the enormous acceleration that occurred with the advent of culture.” https://lnkd.in/dMvAeqz View in LinkedIn

WARNING. “Spawn of the devil, computer viruses may help us realize the full potential of the Net.” http://www.wired.com/1995/02/viruses/ View in LinkedIn

DEEPLY SENTIENT PLANTS. “During fertilization, cell–cell communication events take place to achieve and maximize reproductive success. Additional layers of crosstalk exist, including self-recognition and specialized processes to prevent self-fertilization and consequent inbreeding.” http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1674205214608996 View in LinkedIn

CENTRAL CORE. “One important difference between these polymorphic viruses, as these adaptive variants are known, is that computer viruses only changes form. "Only the package is changed;" the code is not rewritten.” http://www.pcworld.com/article/252103/computer_viruses_could_cross_frontier_into_biological_realm_researchers_say.html View in LinkedIn

THE POLLEN TUBE. “Sperm cells of flowering plants are non-motile and thus require transportation to the egg apparatus via the pollen tube to execute double fertilization. During its journey, the pollen tube interacts with various sporophytic cell types that support its growth and guide it towards the surface of the ovule. The final steps of tube guidance and sperm delivery are controlled by the cells of the female gametophyte.” https://lnkd.in/d9zxv6K View in LinkedIn

PROVOCATIVE QUESTION. “We came to wonder if there can be some kind of convergence between human viruses and computer viruses...It may sound like a scenario for a bad Hollywood movie, but it is not such a stupid question." https://lnkd.in/ddTvp9R View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this first weekend on double fertilization in flowering plants. After millennia of random experimentation and brutal winnowing, the reproductive pieces that survived in this group look more like a functional train crash rather than an elegant and streamlined process of passing on genes and generating diversity by outbreeding. This is a poster child of evolution as a blind band-aid process where incompatible systems are bolted together after lineage fusions in a make-do manner. And still, they somehow work against all odds. View in LinkedIn