Sublime

The answer to whether or not robots have DNA appears to be that they have something that accomplishes most, if not all, of the same function in the world. But it’s differently implemented. Their core, heritable information does not need to be held in individuals, or even within a given species. That information is dispersible, although often

The more uncertain the starting assumptions and the longer the term it tries to account for, the less reliable the model. Those caveats should be kept in mind for all computer studies of evolution.

Progress there had been, the long record of life on Earth was indeed an upward path. The changes, however, had been achieved, he insisted, in great creative stages, these divided by momentous catastrophe. His doctrine, the cataclysmic theory of his own great master, Cuvier, was that all life on the planet had been destroyed repeatedly in order to

The website biohack.sourceforge.net, for example, offers an “open, free synthetic biology kit [that] contains all sorts of information from across the web on how to do it: how to extract and amplify DNA, cloning techniques, making DNA by what’s known as oligonucleotides, and all sorts of other tutorials and documents on techniques in genetic

How could a protein enzyme possibly know how to make a specific DNA sequence as long as six nucleotides? No such enzyme had ever been found. DNA and RNA polymerases are capable of synthesizing long strings of nucleotides, but they don’t do it by themselves—they use DNA as a template. Reverse transcriptases, such as those found in retroviruses, use

the very cofounder of the theory of evolution was an intelligent-design proponent.

Woese did his work years before scientists could easily read the sequence of RNA or DNA. So he and his colleagues did the next best thing: they sliced up Escherichia coli’s 16S rRNA with the help of a virus enzyme.