Last updated 18 March 1999

Biological Organization

Suppose one had the task of designing a living cell -- including a physics and chemistry to support it. What would be a good way to go about this, such that the end result was parsimonious and pleasing, yet captured the essence of aliveness?

What is life, anyhow? Not life as it is known, but as it would have to be in order to be alive.

In such an engineered world, would there / should there be

With parsimony a goal, surely some of these would be superfluous -- the concept of life can't be so messy that it would have to rely on all of these, or even a majority of them.

I am working with Walter Fontana and Leo Buss on this project. Sometimes I am at the Santa Fe Institute when I work on this project.

In autumn 1998, as an exercise, I developed a reversible lambda-calculus.

I presented some of the ideas at the Operational Models of Complex Adaptive Systems workshop, 10-11 December 1998, Neuchâtel, Switzerland.

Background Material / Related Sites

Jonathan Rees