The fact that these algorithms and architecture have been so successfully retargeted to such a variety of gaits and grasping appendages suggests to me that there is an elegant core organization.
I don’t think the rest of biology supports the thesis that success in varied environments implies a simple and elegant core. And it doesn’t seem to follow from standard Occam’s razor either. Are the shortest algorithms the most efficient or the most retargetable? This doesn’t sound right at all. But then again, I don’t know much about biology, please set me right if I’m wrong.
“Elegant” was probably the wrong word. “Modular” is better. I think that biology does support the idea that reuse in biology is most successful when what is reused is a “module” with some of the same virtues that make software modules reusable and retargetable—they are naturally parameterized, they are strongly coherent, and they have loose coupling to other subsystems.
Examples in biology are the reuse of the core genetic machinery of translation, transcription, and replication, as well as the core metabolism of biochemistry. And in development, we have the HOX genes and the rest of the evo-devo toolkit discussed by, for example, Kirschner and Gerhart. These systems are not exactly ‘simple’, but neither are they needlessly baroque.
I’m guessing that these same principles of system reuse apply to animal locomotion, though I admit that I know a lot less about anatomy and neuroscience than I do about biochemistry and molecular biology.
The fact that it’s retargetable and evolved rather than designed seems to suggest elegance. I can imagine evolution producing a moderately complex narrow adaptation, or a simple one that as a side effect of its simplicity happens to generalize, but I don’t see how evolution could produce a complex generalizing adaptation.
I don’t think the rest of biology supports the thesis that success in varied environments implies a simple and elegant core. And it doesn’t seem to follow from standard Occam’s razor either. Are the shortest algorithms the most efficient or the most retargetable? This doesn’t sound right at all. But then again, I don’t know much about biology, please set me right if I’m wrong.
“Elegant” was probably the wrong word. “Modular” is better. I think that biology does support the idea that reuse in biology is most successful when what is reused is a “module” with some of the same virtues that make software modules reusable and retargetable—they are naturally parameterized, they are strongly coherent, and they have loose coupling to other subsystems.
Examples in biology are the reuse of the core genetic machinery of translation, transcription, and replication, as well as the core metabolism of biochemistry. And in development, we have the HOX genes and the rest of the evo-devo toolkit discussed by, for example, Kirschner and Gerhart. These systems are not exactly ‘simple’, but neither are they needlessly baroque.
I’m guessing that these same principles of system reuse apply to animal locomotion, though I admit that I know a lot less about anatomy and neuroscience than I do about biochemistry and molecular biology.
The fact that it’s retargetable and evolved rather than designed seems to suggest elegance. I can imagine evolution producing a moderately complex narrow adaptation, or a simple one that as a side effect of its simplicity happens to generalize, but I don’t see how evolution could produce a complex generalizing adaptation.