Complex animal life has existed on Earth for about 600 million years and likely has a little over two more runs of that length before the Sun takes it away. In the period elapsed, billions of species emerged, flourished, & were lost to time without a shadow on the fossil record.
In Death Note, when Light is offered Shinigami eyes in exchange for half his lifespan, he declines, stating that he wants to reign as a god in his new world for a long time, but later he jokingly adds that had he been offered wings, he might have seriously considered it...
The new GanLum and MK-7602 seem highly promising, but given the parasite’s history of mutating its way to survival in the face of every ‘miracle drug’ thrown at it, it’s likely a matter of time again... I hope that’s a long way off.
Dingle et al. explain that simple, low-complexity outputs are exponentially overrepresented across many different input-output maps, grounding the pattern in algorithmic information theory rather than in any peculiarity of biology.
https://t.co/crdhteUQGW
Wagner’s “arrival of the fittest” and the broader argument that phenotypic variation is not isotropic, but constrained by genetic architecture and developmental systems seems pretty intuitive to me in retrospect, even if difficult to quantify rigorously.
There is work on RNA genotype-phenotype maps showing that phenotypes which are simply more frequent in genotype space can fix even when far less-frequent, but much fitter, alternatives are technically accessible.
This bias is not an RNA-specific feature, notably.
Ward argues that some of the most sophisticated respiratory systems were developed during a period of unusually low atmospheric oxygen levels. I must move myself to higher and higher altitudes until I develop avian lungs and take to the air.