Sublime

“microscopic” or “fundamental” dynamics are reversible, but the “macroscopic” or “emergent” dynamics aren’t.

and natural selection rewired its network. One of the simplest means by which E. coli’s network can be rewired is the accidental duplication of a chunk of DNA. In some cases, the duplication may create two copies of the same switch. If the gene for one of those switches mutates, it may begin to control a different gene. In other cases, extra copies

Living molecules – genes – are merely molecules, obeying the same laws of physics and chemistry as non-living ones. They contain no special substance, nor do they have any special physical attributes.

Martin Bojowald, Once before Time, is one of the most recent proponents of this approach.2

Compressibility and Shannon’s entropy provide a baseline measure of the intrinsic information content of data. But the health of that data must also relate to how robust it is; how well encoded it is to withstand noise and corruption. And when an organism’s data contains mutual, survival related information about the organism and its environment, t

But a cell is not merely a gene-decoding machine. Having unpacked the code by synthesizing a select set of proteins that is encoded in its genes, a cell becomes an integrating machine. A cell uses this set of proteins (and the biochemical products made by proteins) in conjunction with one another to start coordinating its function, its behavior (mo