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WOBBLY COMPLEXITY. “Gould, for example, argues that any recognizable trend can be explained by the “drunkard's walk” model, where “progress” is due simply to a fixed boundary condition. McShea investigates trends in the evolution of certain types of structural and functional complexity, and finds some evidence of a trend but nothing conclusive. In fact, he concludes that “something may be increasing. But is it complexity?”” http://www.pnas.org/content/97/9/4463.full View in LinkedIn

THE QUESTION. “Whether or not complexity increases through evolution has become a contentious issue.” https://lnkd.in/eHHiAUS View in LinkedIn

THE MANTRA. “Biology's First Law: The Tendency for Diversity and Complexity to Increase in Evolutionary Systems. "In any evolutionary system in which there is variation and heredity, there is, in the absence of constraint, a tendency for diversity and complexity to increase." http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/24573-biology-s-first-law-the-tendency-for-diversity-and-complexity-to-increase-in-evolutionary-systems/ View in LinkedIn

IMPACT OF CONTEXT. “The information in DNA comes from the environments and it has been put into the DNA by selection. Darwinian evolution involving selection of all kinds (natural, sexual, and artificial) is the channel through which the complexity and information of the environment creates and shapes the complexity and information of biological organisms.” https://lnkd.in/euEN3Eh View in LinkedIn

EPIGENETIC INFORMATION. “Adami et al. (2000) identify genomic complexity with the amount of information DNA sequences store about their environments. I want to emphasize that not only is the information in DNA about the environment, but that the information in DNA came from the environment.” https://lnkd.in/euEN3Eh View in LinkedIn

COMPLEXITY REVERSALS. “Biological complexity, both genotypic and phenotypic, may trend upward, but can go the other way, sometimes dramatically (as after mass extinctions).” https://lnkd.in/euEN3Eh View in LinkedIn

"INFORMATION does not change whether it is encoded in bits, in nucleotides, or is scratched on a rock: Information is substrate-independent. But information is also, mathematically speaking, extremely rare. The probability of finding a sequence encoding a sizable chunk of information by chance is so small that for practical purposes it is zero." https://lnkd.in/d-TfSCW View in LinkedIn

GENETIC INFORMATION. "One might suggest that the genetic information is equally carried by the amino acids produced by the codons. So that is a total information of 4,392,322,500 bits including the epigenome. In ASCII code, that would be 627,474,642 MB (megabytes)." http://www.decodedscience.org/comparing-genetic-code-dna-binary-code/55476 View in LinkedIn

CENTRAL DOGMA BUSTED. “One of the limitations of the Central Dogma (and, for that matter, the abstract description of a digital computer as a Von Neumann Machine), is that the abstract representation suggests a linear process: one sequence of DNA leads to one mRNA leads to one protein. Clearly, in terms of the cell, this is not the case. The cell manages multiple processes concurrently rather than as a single threaded sequence.” https://lnkd.in/dZN-i-F View in LinkedIn

PROCESSING INFORMATION. "Programmable matter is thus linked to the concept of a material which inherently has the ability to perform information processing." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmable_matter View in LinkedIn