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Mechanisms too simple for humans to design - by Malmesbury

malmesbury.substack.com · 4,228 words · saved by 2 readers

Does a bacterium fit on a floppy disk?

Disclaimer: This article is about living organisms, and how they are sculpted by evolution. Any use of mathematics is metaphorical, not literal – it's only there to give a sense of scale. Apologies to all the people who got correctly offended by my shamelessly hand-wavy references to Kolmogorov complexity. As we all know, humans are terrible at building butterflies. We can make a lot of objectively cool things like nuclear reactors and microchips, but we still can't create a proper artificial insect that flies, feeds, and lays eggs that turn into more butterflies. That seems like evidence…

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