sas@BFLY-VAX.BBN.COM.UUCP (06/10/87)
Actually, the biologists have been borrowing from the history of the Roman Empire. Cincinatus comes down from his farm and codifies the laws for the Republic and creates a nearly perfect mechanism which starts taking over the Mediterranean basin. By providing for a means of succession (read "DNA replication"), the Empire is able to achieve higher levels of organization. Unfortunately, the military (read "the immune system"), slowly grows in strength as the Empire expands and finally reaches a limit to its expansion and spends the next millenium rotting away in Byzantium. Theories about entropy are about complex systems in general, not just the behavior of energy in steam engines. Biologists have latched onto them to account for aging in organisms and to explain the epochs of evolution. (Why aren't there any new phyla being created?) If you've ever tried to make a major change in a decade old program think of what the biologists are up against with their billion year old kludges. Last month, an article in Scientific American described a glucose complex based aging mechanism, arguing that many aging effects could be caused by very slow chemical reactions induced by the operating environment. Next month we may discover an actual internal counter within each cell. It is quite probable that there are dozens of mechanisms at work. With 90% of the genome encoding for garbage, elegant design is more of a serendipity than the norm. Seth Steinberg sas@bbn.com P.S. Did you notice the latest kludge? They've found a gene whose DNA complement also encodes a gene! Kind of like a 68000 program you can execute if you put a logical complement on each instruction fetch. Neat, huh?