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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.
Carl Zimmer • Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life
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
... See moreDan Levitt • What's Gotten Into You: The Story of Your Body's Atoms, from the Big Bang Through Last Night's Dinner
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
... See moreRoss Douthat • Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious
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
... See moreDaniel C Dennett • From Bacteria to Bach and Back
Bernhard Palsson, a biologist at the University of California, San Diego, has overseen the construction of a model of E. coli’s metabolism.
Carl Zimmer • Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life
Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design
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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.
David Deutsch • The Fabric of Reality
the data recounted in this book show, random mutation and natural selection are powerless to build anything remotely as complex as a brain,
Michael J. Behe • Darwin Devolves: The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution
the virus also makes a second protein that protects the microbe from the restriction enzymes. Known as a modification enzyme,