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Smarter Parts Make Collective Systems Too Stubborn
...governing styles and systems with natural checks on the emergence of inequality,” Jessica Flack, an evolutionary biologist and complexity scientist at the Santa Fe Institute, wrote in an email. “And...
Doudna’s Confidence in CRISPR’s Research Potential Burns Bright
...power of CRISPR, the precision genome-editing technology she codeveloped. CRISPR “gives us a way to ultimately control the evolution of any organism — including ourselves. It is a profound thing....
The Astronomer Who’d Rather Build Space Cameras
Jim Gunn helped shape the theory of the evolution of the cosmos before building hardware for major observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope. In 1965, when James Edward Gunn was...
Viruses Can Scatter Their Genes Among Cells and Reassemble
...virus do this? Why would you separate your genome? What are the advantages to having these segments that are packaged separately?” asked Mark P. Zwart, an evolutionary virologist at the...
Unexpected ‘Germline’ Plant Cells May Shield New Generations
...proof. Laurence Hurst, an evolutionary geneticist at the Milner Center for Evolution at the University of Bath, also counsels caution because it’s hard to compare mutation rates across groups with...
Bacterial Clones Show Surprising Individuality
...on an important evolutionary process. “This has been a relatively overlooked phenomenon,” said Hesper Rego, a microbiologist at the Yale School of Medicine. “The idea that microbial populations could evolve...
Where Quantum Probability Comes From
...constitutes a “measurement”? When exactly does it occur? Why are measurements seemingly different from ordinary evolution? Dynamical-collapse theories offer perhaps the most straightforward resolution to the measurement problem. They posit...
Inherited Learning? It Happens, but How Is Uncertain
...of inheritance and an explanation for evolution, enduring even after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Then experimental tests, the rise of Mendelian genetics, and the wealth of...
Playing Hide-and-Seek, Machines Invent New Tools
...from chess to StarCraft II; it’s also an adaptation that seems likely to confer an evolutionary advantage. So it went with hide-and-seek. Even though the AI agents hadn’t received explicit...