I think “building blocks” would have got your point across clearly to me.
Looking at some of your examples, I’m not sure that having common building blocks makes it easy to reverse engineer and replicate in another substrate. Consider making a genetic system based on phosphorous and nitrogen rather than carbon. Despite understanding the modular nature of genes and how they are stored it would be distinctly non-trivial to find P/N based analogues of DNA and the various proteins used in the transcription of that analogue.
My biochemical examples were intended to make a point about evolution, rather than a point about reverse-engineering. I would assume that if we decide to reverse-engineer biological models in neuroscience, the new artificial neurons will not be built out of genetically encoded polymers. Though I might be wrong.
My point was that while there is a an elegant core organization to protein production, there is the confounding factor of protein folding making it hard to reverse engineer.
So there might be similar confounding factors in animal locomotion. Confounding factors are those that take lots of information from various sources that update frequently. For example atom movement relies on the position of the other atoms around it. Neurons have the potential for these sorts of factors in electric field generation, chemical gradients and many connections from other neurons.
I think “building blocks” would have got your point across clearly to me.
Looking at some of your examples, I’m not sure that having common building blocks makes it easy to reverse engineer and replicate in another substrate. Consider making a genetic system based on phosphorous and nitrogen rather than carbon. Despite understanding the modular nature of genes and how they are stored it would be distinctly non-trivial to find P/N based analogues of DNA and the various proteins used in the transcription of that analogue.
My biochemical examples were intended to make a point about evolution, rather than a point about reverse-engineering. I would assume that if we decide to reverse-engineer biological models in neuroscience, the new artificial neurons will not be built out of genetically encoded polymers. Though I might be wrong.
My point was that while there is a an elegant core organization to protein production, there is the confounding factor of protein folding making it hard to reverse engineer.
So there might be similar confounding factors in animal locomotion. Confounding factors are those that take lots of information from various sources that update frequently. For example atom movement relies on the position of the other atoms around it. Neurons have the potential for these sorts of factors in electric field generation, chemical gradients and many connections from other neurons.