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DEEP VESTIGIAL STRUCTURES. "Vestigial features of humans and other organisms are well known and have long been used as key evidence for evolution. Such features include not only anatomical structures but also physiological processes, biochemical reactions, and even behaviors." Not to mention transposons derived from ancient viruses that dominate genomes. http://evolution-outreach.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-014-0012-5 View in LinkedIn

CHICKENS & EGGS. "A longstanding debate—often dubbed the chicken or the egg problem—is which came first, genetic heredity or metabolism? A conundrum arises because neither can operate without the other in contemporary life, where the duality is manifested via the genome–proteome systems." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

DARWIN ON VESTIGES. "Along with paleontological evidence from the fossil record and biogeographic evidence from species distributions, Darwin turned, naturally, to comparative anatomy, citing such well-known topics as homologous and analogous (convergent) features and similarities in skeletons and patterns of embryonic development. Darwin cited another prominent finding of comparative anatomy as an obvious line of evidence for evolution: vestigial features." http://evolution-outreach.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-014-0012-5 View in LinkedIn

GREY ZONE SHIFT. "We therefore identify the transition from non-life to life with a fundamental shift in the causal structure of the system, specifically a transition to a state in which algorithmic information gains direct, context-dependent, causal efficacy over matter." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

"PROGRESSIVE NOTIONS of natural philosophy and theology were simmering in Victorian England when, in 1844, the scientific establishment was rocked by the anonymous publication of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chambers [1844]). This best-selling book presented, in a highly accessible format, then-radical ideas on cosmic and biological evolution." https://lnkd.in/e5Q9TsW View in LinkedIn

LIFE REDEFINED. "We postulate that it is the transition to context-dependent causation—mediated by the onset of information control—that is the key defining characteristic of life." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

CAUSAL EFFICACY. "To be explicit, biological information is distinctive because it possesses a type of causal efficacy —it is the information that determines the current state and hence the dynamics (and therefore also the future state(s)." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

HYBRID SYSTEMS. "It is clear that analogue-only systems are not capable of adaptation in the same way as living systems are. Modern life is a hybrid: digital memory and digital switches enable control over many (non-interfering) analogue states, and therefore enable adaptability to changing environmental conditions with the same basic toolkit." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

DIGITAL SWITCHES. "Orthogonality is, by comparison, relatively easy to achieve with digitized switches. Control is therefore much easier to achieve in an analogue system with digital switches than in a solely analogue system." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

UNIVERSALITY IS DIGITAL. "All known life achieves universality (at least in a limited sense) by using the digital sequence structure of informational polymers. Such universality would be exceedingly difficult to engineer in an analogue-only system given the challenges associated with building reaction networks where each (programmed) reaction is chemically orthogonal to all other reactions." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn