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ANY MATERIALS. "In principle, you could build living systems out of robotics parts. Life is a much more general process than what we see in modern biology. You can have living processes carried by robotic systems, by computational systems and by mixtures of biological, robotics and computational systems." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

HYPEROXYGENATED PERIOD. "Because metabolic oxygen demand increases with increasing body size, environmental oxygen concentration (pO2) is frequently invoked as an important constraint on the size of animals. Giant late Paleozoic insects, with wingspans as large as 70 cm, are the iconic example of the oxygen-body size link; hyperoxic conditions during the Carboniferous and Permian are thought to have permitted the spectacular sizes of the largest insects ever." https://lnkd.in/dEANyiE View in LinkedIn

NEW FORMS. "Life for me is a physical process. In principle, living processes can be carried by different kinds of materials. You are not limited to biochemistry. In our laboratory, in experiments we did at both Los Alamos and here in Denmark, we were not using biological materials. We're using molecules that do not exist in modern biology. We're really building out of something that's different than what modern biology is using." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

PLANT IMPACT ON INSECTS. "Moreover, plant activities appear to have caused rates of evolution in terrestrial animals to accelerate. Late Palaeozoic insect and tetrapod faunas diversified together with terrestrial plants, and enhanced burial of organic carbon raised global oxygen levels, fuelling a spectacular radiation of insect gigantism." https://lnkd.in/dBS9JZw View in LinkedIn

LIFE DEFINED. “The ability to evolve, self-reproduce, metabolize, adapt and die." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

SIMPLEST FORM. "The game, of course, is: How simplistically can that be done? A modern cell is a really complicated machine, but many of us think life can be created in much, much simpler forms." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

MINIMAL CELL. "Because one kind of information control of how you grow and divide may turn out to be better than another information control of how you grow and divide, the better one will be selected and reproduce. As this process continues you have evolution, and then you're done. If you can implement a system that can do this, you have created a minimal cell." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

CHEMICAL CELLS. "They can be organic or inorganic materials or both. If you put them together in a particular way, you can create a system that can take in resources and convert those resources into building blocks for the system to grow and divide. Then if you have information, some kind of guidance for how this division process happens that is inheritable, and if the inheritable information can change from one generation to the next, then you have the possibility for selection." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

"A PROTOCELL is a physical-chemical implementation of the simplest life form that we can either make or that can emerge spontaneously. I think there are many different ways we can make minimal living systems. Just to be clear, I'm speaking about the transition from nonliving to living materials, where you start out with components that are nonbiological." https://lnkd.in/dwADMWc View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this glimpse into early Earth giganticism in insects, and its relationship to the Great Oxygenation event and subsequent variations in oxygen levels, followed by increasing predatory pressures. One thing it demonstrates is the incredible dynamism of adaptation, where insects can become huge, and then equally quickly scale down to avoid predation. Early life on this Planet was full of surprises. View in LinkedIn