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RANDOMLY MUTATING. "But is not genetic programming stochastic by nature? Although it operates on algorithms, it does not find these algorithms through its own algorithms--it finds them by randomly mutating and genetically crossing other patterns." https://lnkd.in/etiQ6T7 View in LinkedIn

FROZEN FORMAT. “So the code was not always thus, but once it was established before the last universal common ancestor of all extant life it has remained under very powerful selective constraints that kept the code frozen in nearly all genomes that subsequently diversified.” https://lnkd.in/d87ZWbH View in LinkedIn

DIGITAL BIOTA. "The forms of digital biota emerging in Cyberspace. Much of these biota are actually pretty simple mathematical rule sets that mimic living processes. But perhaps real life is just an matter of the scale of complexity. As these simple forms grow into more complex systems feeding off computer resources and our attention spans, perhaps we will some day see something really "alive" and really digital." https://lnkd.in/d8s-JuN View in LinkedIn

THE GREAT MISHMASH. “The ‘frozen accident’, as it was described by Crick, that ultimately emerged is certainly non-random, but is more of a mishmash than an elegant plan, which led to new ideas about how the code may have evolved in a series of steps from simpler codes with fewer amino acids.” https://lnkd.in/d87ZWbH View in LinkedIn

FREE WILL. "Meta-Genetic Programming is the proposed meta learning technique of evolving a genetic programming system using genetic programming itself. It suggests that chromosomes, crossover, and mutation were themselves evolved, therefore like their real life counterparts should be allowed to change on their own rather than being determined by a human programmer." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_programming View in LinkedIn

HORIZONTAL EXPLANATION. “Then, why only one frozen accident, assuming that the actual codon assignments are indeed (quasi) accidental? To put it even more generally, why a single last universal common ancestor only? Only one code survived because extensive horizontal gene transfer was an aspect of early evolution without which the transition to the cellular level of complexity would not have been possible. Even a small change in the code has a prohibitive effect on horizontal gene transfer.” https://lnkd.in/dKTqJpY View in LinkedIn

ARTIFICIAL CODE. “New methods of synthetic biology have recently allowed substantial artificial alteration of the code in bacteria. Although the fitness of the bacteria with altered codes has not been thoroughly studied, their viability itself seems to support the view that the fitness of different codes might not differ dramatically, so that the (near) universality of the standard genetic code is likely to stem from high fitness barriers separating it from other codes, or in other words, low fitness of the intermediates.” https://lnkd.in/dKTqJpY View in LinkedIn

PARADIGM WRECKERS. “Further study of how translation functions in Blastocrithidia will cast a unique light on how the code works, which will certainly be challenging since it is not only an uncultured symbiont, but also a trypanosome, a lineage which is notorious for re-writing the rule books of molecular biology and genomics.” https://lnkd.in/d87ZWbH View in LinkedIn

INTERMEDIATE FORM. “While we must bear in mind that most non-canonical codes evolved independently from the others, and so may have evolved through different steps, it is nevertheless intriguing to have an extant nuclear genome with an ambiguous intermediate.” https://lnkd.in/d87ZWbH View in LinkedIn

PREDICTION FULFILLED. “Swart et al. recently reported evidence for just such a context-dependent process linked to a similar genetic code change in a ciliate, where UAR=Q and UGA=W or stop, depending on the downstream sequence. These codes are also exciting because they fulfill a central prediction of one of the models for how the genetic code evolves, the Ambiguous Intermediate model.” https://lnkd.in/d87ZWbH View in LinkedIn