What is the fundamental creative force behind life on Earth? It's a question that has vexed mankind for millennia, and thanks to theory and almost a year's worth of number-crunching on a supercomputer, Rice University physicist and bioengineer Michael Deem thinks he has the answer: A changing environment may organize the structure of genetic information itself.
Our results suggest that the beautiful, intricate and interrelated structures observed in nature may be the generic result of evolution in a changing environment," Deem said. "The existence of such structure need not necessarily rest on intelligent design or the anthropic principle."
The information that allows all living things to survive and reproduce is encoded in genes. Deem's theory probed the structure of this genetic information, looking for patterns that were created over time.
Modularity and hierarchy are prevalent in biology, from the way atoms are arranged in molecules
clipped from: physorg.com