Top 10 innovations created through evolution, NewScientist Magazine (print ed.), 9th April 2005
No, haven't included all 10 here, just snippets from the top two of interest to information systems. Full article is available here online. (subscription required)
By Helen Phillips
The evolution of brains... lifted life beyond vegetation. Brains provided, for the first time, a way for organisms to deal with environmental change on a timescale shorter than generations.A nervous system allows two extremely useful things to happen: movement and memory. If you're a plant and your food source disappears, that's tough. But if you have a nervous system that controls muscles, then you can actually move around and seek out food, sex and shelter...
With brains comes senses... and a memory. Together, these let the animal monitor in real time whether things are getting better or worse. This in turns allows a simple system of prediction and reward...
By Bob Holmes
Your hand has five fingers because the cells that used to live between them died when you were an embryo... Were it not for death, we would not even be born.Your cells are constantly racking up mutations that threaten to make your tightly controlled cell division run amok. But surveillance systems - such as the one involving the p53 protein, called the "guardian of the genome" - detect almost all such errors and direct the affected cells to commit suicide.
Programmed cell death plays a central role in everyday life too. It ensures a constant turnover of cells in the gut lining and generates our skin's protective outer layer of dead cells. When the immune system has finished wiping out an infection, the now-redundant white blood cells commit suicide in an orderly fashion to allow the inflammation to wind down...