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INTELLECTUAL SIMPLICITY. “The paradox is that although evolution has run out of things to do, in the case of knowledge and wisdom the exact reverse appears to be the case. Here we have not reached the end of complexity.” https://lnkd.in/euEN3Eh View in LinkedIn

LIMITS OF COMPLEXITY. “I present evidence that biological systems are near, and in some cases have reached, the limits of complexity. Such is evident from areas as diverse as extremophiles, nervous and sensory systems, enzymes such as Rubisco, complex symbioses and functional complexes such as teeth and arthropod tagmosis.” https://lnkd.in/euEN3Eh View in LinkedIn

THE KEY. “Non-coding RNA holds the key to development and evolution of complexity.” https://lnkd.in/dMrxDE5 View in LinkedIn

SHARED SCRIPT. “An organism's DNA thus is not only a “book” about the organism, but is also a book about the environment it lives in, including the species it co-evolves with. It is well known that not all of the symbols in an organism's DNA correspond to something. These sections, sometimes referred to as “junk-DNA,” usually consist of portions of the code that are unexpressed or untranslated (i.e., excised from the mRNA).” http://www.pnas.org/content/97/9/4463.full View in LinkedIn

INFORMATION IS PHYSICAL. “A key aspect of information theory is that information cannot exist in a vacuum; that is, information is physical. This statement implies that information must have an instantiation (be it ink on paper, bits in a computer's memory, or even the neurons in a brain). Furthermore, it also implies that information must be about something. Lines on a piece of paper, for example, are not inherently information until it is discovered that they correspond to something, such as (in the case of a map) to the relative location of local streets and buildings.” http://www.pnas.org/content/97/9/4463.full View in LinkedIn

COMPELLED COMPLEXITY. “We show that, because natural selection forces genomes to behave as a natural “Maxwell Demon,” within a fixed environment, genomic complexity is forced to increase.” http://www.pnas.org/content/97/9/4463.full View in LinkedIn

“DUPLICATION is not the same as life. Complex chemicals are capable of duplication. Amino acids and protein are not alive, but they duplicate and are a requirement for replication. Proto-life catalyzes and carries information required for its own existence.” https://lnkd.in/dSqra5e View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this second and last weekend on jumping genes. These often autonomous mobile threads of DNA have been important architects of genetic variation across species, liberally sharing genes and making new genes. Like prions, which are just clumps of tangled protein, these chemical threads can proliferate, infect, and move around in the cellular or genomic (respectively) ecosystems that they inhabit. They push our understanding of the boundaries of what it is to be alive towards information that can replicate itself and evolve. View in LinkedIn

STARTING POINT. “It seems that many systems both increase their complexity if initialized in a low complexity state, and then reliably and robustly maintain high (but finite) complexity once it is attained. Some of the most prominent examples are the many biological systems undergoing natural selection that seem to start with low complexity and then increase their complexity.” https://lnkd.in/euEN3Eh View in LinkedIn

ENZYME LIMITS. “Take the protein Rubisco, of central importance in photosynthesis where as a carboxylase it acts as the enzyme central to the fixation of carbon. Yet, as is well-known, its rate of activity is cripplingly slow, explaining why it is the most abundant protein on the planet. It is difficult to think of an example where even a modest improvement in efficiency would not be adaptively highly significant, yet the only solution appears to be by rampantly convergent methods of carbon dioxide concentration, be they by carboxysomes.” https://lnkd.in/euEN3Eh View in LinkedIn