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INFORMATION TRANSFER. "It is only by clearly understanding how chemical systems can transfer and process information that we can hope to understand how self-replication and evolution can occur, and by implication, understand how life might have begun." https://lnkd.in/dhc7k7H View in LinkedIn

INFORMATION. "This work suggests that the concept of a self-replicating chemistry is closely related to the concept of a chemistry that can store information and compute." https://lnkd.in/dhc7k7H View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE continues from last week on this final piece about increasing genetic complexity, or not in nature. The innate world appears to be driven by entropy, the drive towards chaos, lowest energy, greatest stability. In contrast, living things build complexity, higher energy structures, and least stability. Whether there is a trend towards greater genetic complexity and information or not is an interesting question. View in LinkedIn

COULD A STRAND OF INFORMATION called code, a binary data set, ever achieve a critical mass, a higher complexity, or cooperative functionality? Even if it did, we may still not understand what occurred right before our very eyes. View in LinkedIn

UNEXPECTED COMBINATIONS. "A single-celled bacterium is alive, but if you separate the macromolecules that combined to create the bacterium, these units are not alive. Based on our knowledge of macromolecules, we would not have been able to predict that they could combine to form a living organism, nor could we have predicted all of the characteristics of the resulting bacterium." https://lnkd.in/epkJVpt View in LinkedIn

"SELF-MODIFYING CODE is code that alters its own instructions while it is executing - usually to reduce the instruction path length and improve performance or simply to reduce otherwise repetitively similar code, thus simplifying maintenance." https://lnkd.in/ddCjHJk View in LinkedIn

NEW HUMAN ECOLOGY. "The internet is the decisive technology of the Information Age, and with the explosion of wireless communication in the early twenty-first century, we can say that humankind is now entirely connected." https://lnkd.in/dsHe6fk View in LinkedIn

AUTONOMOUS CODE. "Viv’s biggest secret is the technology to bring the different services together on the fly to respond to requests for which it hasn’t been specifically programmed. “It is a program that writes its own program, which is the only way you can scale thousands of services working together that know nothing about one another." Given inevitable errors, this is akin to genetic variation." https://lnkd.in/deszndk View in LinkedIn

ALTER COMMAND. "Although code can be generated by other code (metaprogamming), programs generally don’t change their own code as they run; this has the potential to devolve into a mess of difficult-to-track changes. However, some languages do allow programs to alter "their own script as it ran, such as with COBOL’s ALTER command.” https://lnkd.in/dScXnfT View in LinkedIn

GENERATIVE ROOT. "A program that copies itself can generally be written extremely succinctly. In English, such a program might be: "Write this sentence twice, the second time in quotes. ‘‘Write this sentence twice, the second time in quotes.’’ https://lnkd.in/dhc7k7H View in LinkedIn