Category: Uncategorized

CHAOS BEATS SMARTS. "Evolution copes better than intelligent, top-down design with the evolving constraints of a market landscape that is constantly shifting." https://lnkd.in/dbVEZAf View in LinkedIn

E COLI SUICIDE. "We investigated Escherichia coli responding to the attack of an obligately lytic phage by committing suicide in order to prevent parasite transmission to nearby relatives. We found that bacterial suicide provides large benefits to survivors at marginal costs to committers. The cost of suicide was low, because infected cells are moribund, rapidly dying upon phage infection, such that no more opportunity for reproduction remains." https://lnkd.in/d53-z28 View in LinkedIn

ALL OVER THE PLACE. "The bazaar is like evolution: messy, inefficient, and slow. Lots of bad ideas are tried; a lot of them stick around for as long as they provide more value than they subtract; and progress takes a long time. Just as the human body has components that are useless today (e.g., the coccyx), evolving software ecosystems always carry a lot useless baggage. That's how evolution works." https://lnkd.in/dbVEZAf View in LinkedIn

"ALTRUISM can evolve when relatedness is low: evidence from bacteria committing suicide upon phage infection. High relatedness among interacting individuals has generally been considered a precondition for the evolution of altruism. However, kin-selection theory also predicts the evolution of altruism when relatedness is low, as long as the cost of the altruistic act is minor compared with its benefit." https://lnkd.in/d53-z28 View in LinkedIn

VIRTUAL EVOLUTION. "Rather than remove an erroneous selection, evolution would just add a countercorrecting solution, or reroute the main event around the bad sector. The final formula had the appearance of being some miraculous Rube Goldberg collection of items that by some happy accident worked." https://lnkd.in/d3G_hCh View in LinkedIn

COMPETING STRATEGIES. "Similarly, hosts with large suicide efficacy overtake those with adaptive immunity provided that the suicide propensity is greater than a threshold that grows with the efficacy of adaptive immunity. Notwithstanding this general trend, innate and adaptive immunity systems appear to coexist in other regions of the phase space." https://lnkd.in/d9zsv9R View in LinkedIn

TRAIT FIXATION. "High suicide efficacies prevent fixation of adaptive immunity not only in those regions where the cost-benefit balance for adaptive immunity is slightly unfavorable (even if fixation would occur in the absence of suicide by virtue of population structure), but also in some regions where this balance is favorable to adaptive immunity." https://lnkd.in/d9zsv9R View in LinkedIn

COEXISTING GROUPS. "On the other hand, if the immune efficacy is too high, hosts with and without adaptive immunity tend to coexist as the former generate environments with low pathogen pressure. This result resembles those obtained by previous theoretical studies on well-mixed populations, which predict lack of fixation for highly effective immunity systems and possible polymorphisms on the degree of immunity evolved by hosts." https://lnkd.in/d9zsv9R View in LinkedIn

STRUCTURED POPULATIONS. "Due to limited pathogen dispersion, hosts can benefit from the local decrease in pathogen abundance produced by their neighbors’ adaptive immunity. In a structured population, neighboring hosts are phenotypically correlated, reinforcing the advantage of adaptive immunity and contributing to its fixation. This effect could allow fixation of adaptive immunity even under conditions where the cost-benefit balance is not in its favor." https://lnkd.in/d9zsv9R View in LinkedIn

"ADAPTIVE IMMUNITY provides a direct benefit to the host organism that possesses the immune mechanism and thus does not require population structure to evolve. There are, however, instances when population structure favors fixation of adaptive immunity through a mechanism analogous to the one observed for altruistic suicide." https://lnkd.in/d9zsv9R View in LinkedIn