You can design and order custom genes online to make e-coli do different things.
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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Alright, thanks to this comment section, I now need years of free times because it's all so fascinating I need to learn about all this!
Several things are regularly in my "ponder and wonder" list, the most recent being:
- Chaos theory
- Higher dimensions (>4)
- The actual scale of space versus our normal human scale
- The idea of social/societal evolution (how can we be better together as a species)
I can get lost for a while in any of these topics.
You might want to check out the novel Bloom by Wil McCarthy. It uses Conway's Game of Life and other cellular automata to illustrate several plot points.
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Bergsons theory of mind. I wish i understood it enough to put a tldr, but its complex and has been misunderstood.
Heres another one. Michael behe's mousetrap. He likens cellular structure as a mousetrap, with every piece forming a necesesary part, and without any one part it ceases to function.
Back when i was a creationist christian and didnt accept evolution as fact, he was a hero. Endogenous retroviral dna put that all to rest. Except maybe not.
The counter arguments were that other structures could form over time to create the minimalist structures we see today, like using scaffolding to construct a self sustaining roman bridge or replacing the wooden base of the mousetrap with the floor. Obviously behe is mistaken.
But he claims not, that he doesnt argue that variants of mousetraps can't exist. He argues that all exist without scaffolding. We dont see cellular structures with unnecessary parts that can be acted upon by evolution. Everything already is the end product after evolution has selected away the unnecessary parts. So how can evolution be happening the way its described? We just go between different end products. Theres no structures still with scaffolding.
This keeps me up at night. Maybe theres more to evolution that we dont know yet.
What are some other rules to the excel example you gave, kinda want to try programming something like this to see how itβd play out
Just look up "The Game of Life." It's not really a spread sheet, that's simply how it's displayed (grids of pixels that are either living, dead, or food) and it just kinda simulates an ecosystem in the most very, very basic of ways. All you can do to influence the game is change what a grid contains, with the goal (if you can say it has any) of keeping a sustainable system going.
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