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"PROGRESSIVE NOTIONS of natural philosophy and theology were simmering in Victorian England when, in 1844, the scientific establishment was rocked by the anonymous publication of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chambers [1844]). This best-selling book presented, in a highly accessible format, then-radical ideas on cosmic and biological evolution." https://lnkd.in/e5Q9TsW View in LinkedIn

LIFE REDEFINED. "We postulate that it is the transition to context-dependent causation—mediated by the onset of information control—that is the key defining characteristic of life." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

CAUSAL EFFICACY. "To be explicit, biological information is distinctive because it possesses a type of causal efficacy —it is the information that determines the current state and hence the dynamics (and therefore also the future state(s)." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

INFORMATION AS A PROPERTY. "The central position of information in biology is not itself especially new or radical. What is often sidestepped, however, is the fact that in biological systems information is not merely a way to label states, but a property of the system." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

ACTIONS NOT STRUCTURE. "It is the functionality of the expressed RNAs and proteins—not the bits—that is biologically important." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

JUST A MOLECULE. "The biologically relevant information stored in DNA therefore has very little to do with its specific chemical nature (beyond the fact that it is a digital linear polymer). The genetic material could just as easily be a different variety of nucleic acid (or a different molecule altogether), as recently experimentally confirmed." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

"DNA IS NOT A BLUEPRINT for an organism: no information is actively processed by DNA alone. Rather, DNA is a (mostly) passive repository for transcription of stored data into RNA, some (but by no means all) of which goes on to be translated into proteins." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this section on the structural evolution of the human foot. The smell of the catacombs of the great Natural History Museum on Cromwell Road in London pervades this work. Anatomists scrutinizing old and obscure samples in basements. True beautiful Victorian scholarship brought (somewhat) to the modern era. Bolt-on evolution is alive and well in the toolbox of Rube Goldberg. https://lnkd.in/eFVn57d View in LinkedIn

VARIED VESTIGIAL MYSCLE. "The plantaris muscle and tendon may be regarded as the vestigial remains of a primitive flexor muscle of the toes, which, originally continuous with the plantar aponeurosis, later was rendered discontinuous through intermediate attachment to the calcaneum. The plantaris muscle and its tendon are subject to considerable variation in both the points of origin and of insertion. In an examination of 150 lower extremities, the authors have encountered four types of insertion of the tendon." https://lnkd.in/ehfEQ7g View in LinkedIn

VESTIGIAL STRUCTURES OF THE FOOT. "In numerous mammalian taxa one or more toes have become vestigial. In numerous others, one or more toes are lost and the associated metatarsals are reduced to a vestigial state. Locomotor changes may have provided the selective pressure that drove the evolution of vestigiality in many mammalian skeletal structures." https://lnkd.in/eMd4h72 View in LinkedIn