Robert Rosen

[Marcus G. Daniels]

>
> What's your point?  Oh let me guess.  The rest of us are all idiots and
> this has all been solved already?
>  
I was trying to augment the idea below with an example.   Boundaries
implied by terms like `organism' or `cell' could easily become too
rigid..  much as the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology became too rigid
given reverse transcriptase.
> The trouble is that they are not _simply_ self-reinforcing.  Each
> iteration through the cycle _changes_ the system.  So, you cannot
> _finitely_ list all cycles up until some point UNLESS you actually do
> it.  I.e. the end result of the 4 billion years of iteration is not
> analytically predictable from the very first set of axioms we started
> with 4 billion years ago.  It's incompressible because each iteration
> changes the building blocks.  
When I was a kid I used to play Core Wars, where we'd write little
programs that fought for memory and processor resources.  Even these
little programs would show unexpected dynamics when they interacted,
sometimes even merging into a sort of superspecies.  
--
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not
tried it.''
Donald Knuth, 1977

[glen ep ropella]

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Marcus G. Daniels on 01/03/2008 10:46 PM:
> I was trying to augment the idea below with an example.   Boundaries
> implied by terms like `organism' or `cell' could easily become too
> rigid..  much as the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology became too rigid
> given reverse transcriptase.

Ahhh.  Mea culpa.  Sorry for being defensive.  I thought you were
accusing RR of not doing his homework.  I have trouble with your
hyper-brevity. [grin]

- --
glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com
There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're
talking about. -- John Von Neumann

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