Year: 2022

EVOLVABLE AND ADAPTABLE? "Both theoretical models and tantalizing experimental clues suggest that HGT is essential for microbial survival and could be an evolvable, adaptive capacity mediated by dedicated vehicles originating from domesticated selfish elements. Yet this concept runs afoul of the distrust of ‘evolution of evolvability’ that is deeply ingrained among biologists." (HGT = horizontal gene transfer). https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

FACT NOT THEORY. "Much like evolution itself, extensive HGT in the microbial world is a fact and not a ‘theory’. However, understanding the routes, causes, and consequences of horizontal gene flow as well as constructing the actual, quantitative theoretical framework of this pervasive process will keep many biologists busy for decades to come." (HGT = horizontal gene transfer). https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this two weekend sampling of horizontal gene flow. Evidence has accumulated that this gene mixing mechanism has played a vastly important role in the evolution of all life forms on earth, even those whose gene mixing strategies are largely vertical. Microorganisms, primarily bacteria and viruses, and mobile genetic elements, have played the driving role in horizontal and promiscuous gene sharing, driving evolution in previously unexpected ways. View in LinkedIn

BURIED PATTERNS IN LARGE DATA SETS. "The program was unveiled in April, when it used readouts of a double-pendulum to infer Newton’s second law of motion and the law of conservation of momentum. It could be an invaluable tool for revealing other, more complicated laws that have eluded humans." (Eurequa). https://lnkd.in/dEC3j_P View in LinkedIn

ORIGIN OF EUREQA. “Eureqa is descended from Lipson’s work on self-contemplating robots that figure out how to repair themselves. The same algorithms that guide the robots’ solution-finding computations have been customized for analyzing any type of data." https://lnkd.in/dEC3j_P View in LinkedIn

CHANGING MANY VARIABLES TOGETHER. "In most of science, you try to keep everything constant except for one variable. You turn one knob at a time, and see how the system responds. That’s wonderful for linear systems...But most biology is complex and non-linear. Emergent behaviors are very hard to understand unless you turn many knobs at a time, and we can’t figure out which knobs to turn. So we’re going to let Eureqa pick them.” https://lnkd.in/dEC3j_P View in LinkedIn

BIG DATA MINING. "Condensing rules from raw data has long been considered the province of human intuition, not machine intelligence. It could foreshadow an age in which scientists and programs work as equals to decipher datasets too complex for human analysis." (Eureqa). https://lnkd.in/dEC3j_P View in LinkedIn

BOT WARS. “Study reveals bot-on-bot editing wars raging on Wikipedia's pages.” https://lnkd.in/du9yK8t View in LinkedIn

REPEATED REFINEMENT. "Initially, the equations generated by the program failed to explain the data, but some failures were slightly less wrong than others. Using a genetic algorithm, the program modified the most promising failures, tested them again, chose the best, and repeated the process until a set of equations evolved to describe the systems. Turns out, some of these equations were very familiar: the law of conservation of momentum, and Newton’s second law of motion." (Eureqa). https://lnkd.in/dEC3j_P View in LinkedIn

EXPERIMENTAL CHAMP. "Sometimes, they’re even better than humans are. US chemists have created a machine-learning algorithm that studies successful and failed experiments in order to beat humans at predicting ways to make crystals." https://lnkd.in/dymCyw7 View in LinkedIn