Re: The Sciences of the Artificial applied to Biology

On 10/07/2025 9:38 am, Joe Gwinn wrote:

I forgot to mention that he Sciences of the Artificial digs deep into
why living things (even microscopic ones) have distinct organs and
often components within such organs, versus the organism being a mass
of tissue that somehow does everything.  The driver is efficiency and
simplicity.
 This assumes that life has already emerged in some unspecified way,
and goes from there.  This is a different approach than Dawkins'
Blind-Watchmaker arguments.

Of course it is. Dawkins is a biologists and Simon Herbert is a professor of computer science.
Dawkins wants to know how something evolved. Herbert wants to know how something that exists and survives happens to work.
Both have an interest in the fine detail of the processes that keep organisms alive, but Dawkin wants to know how the processes have changed as the organism have evolved, while Herbert is primarily interested in how they work now

Ref:  "Simon_Herbert_A_The_Sciences_of_the_Artificial_3rd_ed" - The
Architecture of Complexity.  New copies are available from MIT Press.

Despite being published by the MIT Press, Herbert is at Carnegie-Mellon.
This shouldn't come as a surprise. MIT press also published my wife's textbook, even though she was only at MIT briefly in the 1970s as a post-doc.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney