All my Life, is Changing Every Day, In Every Possible Way

This is actually a follow-up on a previous post, Information is Life In Formation.

I recently read on Slashdot about an article of Freeman Dyson, a well-known physicist and mathematician, supposedly about "Open Source Biology". His article, entitled Our Biotech Future, in turn, references the work of Carl Woese, famous American microbiologist - the discoverer of Archaea among other things.

Specifically, it references two of Woese's articles, "A New Biology for a New Century"(abstract|full text) and Biology's Next Revolution. Making a nice and interesting story abruptly short, in those articles Woese lends support to the idea that in the beginning, Life wasn't about Species. Instead, Life was Open Source, in the sense that in the primordial soup, primitive life-forms were exchanging genetic material in a kind of free, horizontal manner, like a sort of massively parallel rewriting system of sorts.

And all was wonderful in the Garden of Eden, till this organism (likened to Bill Gates) appeared, that didn't allow exchange of genetic material with the others. And so, Bacteria, Archaea and Eukarya or Eukaryotes developed in species, only transferring genetic material in a vertical manner - to their descendents, instead of the previously ubiquitous horizontal transfer. The species-based Life prevailed, probably being more resilient to destructive change, and the primordial soup organisms disappeared, but this also meant a significant slow down of evolution.One should note that HGT is still common in Bacteria, and even between Bacteria and fungi, for example, and it is thought to be one of the important causes of the development of bacterial drug resistance.

Nowadays, Dyson argues, the wheel has turned full circle and humans, through the use of advanced breeding and genetic engineering are able to transfer genetic material from some organisms to others, essentially being able to break the interspecies barrier, creating chimeras, transgenic organisms, like in the golden age of horizontal genetic material exchange.
Well, that sounded to me a lot like that previous post, that stated that all Life needed is Media for Information pattern storage and interaction, an initial Seeding of the media, and Time. Oh, and about the Tree of Life, there seems to be none. In the presence of HGT, the Tree of Life has no real root, but an initial Seeding.

How does this relate to cellular automata like Conway's Game of Life, where stable, resilient-to-change patterns also appear? Would a similar computational device be able to create a "full-blown" (whatever that means) species structure? Food for further thought.

Anyway, I (just may) have told you so [tm] :-). Actually, the most striking idea seems the fact that, although at the publishing of the former post about Information being Life in Formation I had almost no idea about HGT and the details about the development of primitive Life, and was composing a picture based on the Computational, Information-theoretic approach and intuitions, its main conclusions are largely confirmed by biological "facts". So, even if the Universe isn't, after all, a gigantic cellular automaton as some would say, it still seems that Information processing and Life are so intimately, essentially linked that there is no conceivable way one could exist without the other: the essence of Life lies at least as much in its Software, as in its Hard(Wet)ware (see also another post).

The fine print:

• The title of the post is actually made up of the first two verses of The Cranberries song Dreams;
• "The Young Family" is a work by Australian artist Patricia Piccinini.

Designer genes

Slashdot fortune: Do molecular biologists wear designer genes?

123133721

The Illusionist

The Illusionist (No Strings Attached)

The spirit drinks are finished,
Rusted are the wheels and chains,
No smoky trails in mirror relished,
Dismantled by our weary brains.

The magic flowers have withered,
The old hat is ripped and torn,
No phantom rabbits lingered,
In former white gloves never worn.

No more tricks upon us
From your coffers to bestow,
But for the ghostly chorus
Of the mind: "As above, so below".

-- O. Cean - 1337 Magickal Spells

More numbers

Find numbers N and M such that:

1. N!*M! + N*(N+M)*(M+M)^N = (N+M)!
   
2. N!*M!*(N+M)! = N*(N*M)!
   

Trial and error

Science is about trial and error: you make an error, then you go to trial.

Metamath problem

Find numbers N and M so you can construct a valid mathematical formula with:

• N factorial signs (!);
  
• M multiplication signs (*), numbers N, numbers M;
  
• one equal sign (=);
  
• in addition, a plus (+).
  

and as many parantheses as you want.

Information is Life In Formation

What is Life?

I propose that Life is a phenomenon that needs these conditions:

• A medium that supports the encoding of information and allows the interaction of the encoded patterns
  
• Seeding of the medium (initial or continuous)
  
• Time to evolve

That's ALL. Or, as mathematicians would put it, these and only these are the required conditions. And that's the main idea of this post - the fact that any such system has the intrinsic potential to support arbitrary complex (and beautiful) Life-forms.

A system that fulfills these conditions will, sooner or later, exhibit emergence, the emergence of Life. Autopoietic systems, structures which are able to fabricate themselves, possibly with variations, will appear. Then Earth-like life is only a more or less huge number of millions of years away.

Yeah, that's right, YOU are not significantly more alive, or living than some information patterns, say, some moderatly complicated bit-strings, this is the message.

What are the implications of this bull^H^H^H^Htheory you ask? Well, there are two main implications:

• For any living systems, we can find the encoding medium and the ways it allows for their interaction.
  
• For any structure, physical or theoretical, that qualifies as a Life-supporting medium by having the above properties, we can think about the nature of Life it is able to support.