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.
