Categories
Complexity

The Community of Me

Context: Mobile Genes From the Mother Shape the Baby’s Microbiome It’s interesting – we can rarely predict precisely what complex systemic relationships will occur, we can only be certain that they will occur. Our own continuity as individual (human) organisms is a function of the extent to which this emergence is a reliable fact. That […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Return of the Wicked Problem: Antibiotic Resistance

The return of the Wicked Problem. The problem of antibiotic resistance characterises a key symmetry of “wickedness” in any problem-space. That is, the activities, responses, interdictions and behaviours that might solve the problem are also those inadvertently exacerbate it. It is an endemic property of complex systems to seek optimal patterns of self-propagation. What at […]

Categories
information

Viruses Versus Cellular Life: Who’s the Boss?

Context: The most common organism in the oceans harbors a virus in its DNA Meta-replicatory strategies (as explained in the article linked above) being those of diversifying and exploiting multiple channels of optimal and simultaneous self-replication. The referenced order of magnitude more viruses than bacteria in the ocean already suggests that the grey-zone between “living” […]