Given how evolution seems to work in practice - building beings out of discrete organs and they scale up/down to an optimal size depending on conditions - I'd expect that this will hold for most things.
I'm not nature, but the low-entropy way of building these systems would be to have biological equivalents of variables that control the size (and probably shape) of different features. That would be an evolutionary advantage, because species with genomes organised that way would be amenable to evolving into local optimums.
To rephrase; evolution works best when there is a small area of the genome where tiny changes have large impacts on the size of an organ without altering its function.
I'm surprised a tiny change in genes doesn't completely destroy the viability of the organism. You can change one character in code and it no longer compiles or the entire thing crashes.
Evo-Devo! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydqReeTV_vk
Yep, those are the only words I know for that melody.
... Which is also true of some songs parodied by Weird Al, come to think of it.
Given how evolution seems to work in practice - building beings out of discrete organs and they scale up/down to an optimal size depending on conditions - I'd expect that this will hold for most things.
I'm not nature, but the low-entropy way of building these systems would be to have biological equivalents of variables that control the size (and probably shape) of different features. That would be an evolutionary advantage, because species with genomes organised that way would be amenable to evolving into local optimums.
To rephrase; evolution works best when there is a small area of the genome where tiny changes have large impacts on the size of an organ without altering its function.
> variables that control the size (and probably shape) of different features
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeobox
I'm surprised a tiny change in genes doesn't completely destroy the viability of the organism. You can change one character in code and it no longer compiles or the entire thing crashes.
They do "knockout" experiments where people disable various genes all the time and find that some are essential and some aren't. See https://phys.org/news/2025-02-proteins-yeast-colonies-reveal... for one that my RSS reader found for me.
This provides some explanations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_mutation
Lookup Walter Gehring's fruit fly experiments if you want something similar and also want to be grossed out.
Dna is the last frontier of programming. It's gods programming language, so to speak.
There may be a day where we can grow machines. Self healing space ships etc
A little bit surprised we are still so early in our understanding of it.
We can grow machines right now. We do it all the time.
https://www.samandfuzzy.com/68
yeah, it’s humbling to visit the bio folk from the ivory tower of compsci :)