Sublime

The deadly beauty of restriction and modification enzymes is that restriction enzymes are durable, whereas modification enzymes are short-lived. If E. coli loses the P1 virus, it quickly loses its shields and cannot make new ones.

Miescher speculated about the kind of molecule in the nucleus that might be able to transmit heredity. The chemical techniques of the day were too crude to provide an answer, yet he was on the verge of making one of the greatest predictions in all of biology. In 1874, he suggested, “If one . . . wants to assume7 that a single substance . . . is the

Prior to Darwin’s account of life’s slow ascent from bacteria to Bach, it was easier to believe in a kind of special creation, where having first made the cosmos God then sculpted each species in its finished form, making every plant and animal’s mere existence a standing proof of the miraculous. The mechanism of evolution by natural selection, by

In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), I argued that natural selection is an algorithmic process, a collection of sorting algorithms that are themselves composed of generate-and-test algorithms that exploit randomness (pseudo-randomness, chaos) in the generation phase, and some sort of mindless quality-control testing phase, with the winners advancing

Bernhard Palsson, a biologist at the University of California, San Diego, has overseen the construction of a model of E. coli’s metabolism.

For highly adapted replicators (which are the only ones worth calling replicators) we need consider only fairly small variations, because under most large variations they would no longer be replicators.

the data recounted in this book show, random mutation and natural selection are powerless to build anything remotely as complex as a brain,

the virus also makes a second protein that protects the microbe from the restriction enzymes. Known as a modification enzyme,