
A Proposed Framework for Cellular Evolution - yters
https://journals.blythinstitute.org/ojs/index.php/cbi/article/view/27/28
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hyperion2010
In case anyone is wondering about the Blythe Institute, it looks like it is an
organization that supports and attempts to promulgate intelligent design. This
would explain why this paper has no references despite the fact that it
retreads ideas that have been discussed in the evolutionary biology community
for at least half a century.

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yters
Editor here.

Thank you for the helpful feedback regarding the references.

For further information about the goals of the journal, please see our Editors
note.

[https://journals.blythinstitute.org/ojs/index.php/cbi/articl...](https://journals.blythinstitute.org/ojs/index.php/cbi/article/view/26/27)

We are interested in non-reductive approaches to science and related areas
such as mathematics and economics.

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selestify
From a software perspective, I don't believe you can deduce the development
process of a software project from the dependencies and interfaces alone. Just
because many websites these days have a heavy database dependency doesn't mean
that websites evolved out of databases; initial websites were just static HTML
content, and eventually websites started adding databases as a dependency to
generate dynamic HTML content.

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ngcc_hk
Good analogy

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baking
I find the phrase "ontology reflects phylogeny" in the abstract to be a bit
odd. The original formulation was “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” and
Stephen Jay Gould has written a book on the history of the idea, so I'm not
sure if the revision is intentional or due to sloppiness.

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hyperpallium
The pdf has proper fonts (d/l link top right
[https://journals.blythinstitute.org/ojs/index.php/cbi/articl...](https://journals.blythinstitute.org/ojs/index.php/cbi/article/download/27/28/))

I've only skimmed it, would appreciate a tl;dr.

The non-evolvability of interfaces reminds me of Parnas' famous _On the
Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules_
([https://www.win.tue.nl/~wstomv/edu/2ip30/references/criteria...](https://www.win.tue.nl/~wstomv/edu/2ip30/references/criteria_for_modularization.pdf)),
where you choose variant modules demarcated by invariant interfaces, such that
the evolution you anticpate will occur within the modules.

This approach is great, until it turns out your choice of interfaces was wrong
because you are terrible at predicting the future... but because of the
dependencies on them, change is difficult. Dependencies ossify. All you can do
is rewrite from scratch.

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maxpetis
This was first really seen by people saying that Black people of Africa are
much closer in evolution to the ape than white people, that we evolved from
different branches or that blacks evolved much later than
us.[https://www.primeassignment.com](https://www.primeassignment.com)

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johnnyb_61820
For those wanting a TL;DR: The main suggestions by the author are in section
2. Essentially, it says that modularity allows any errors to be contained,
conserved design-by-contract interfaces allows for system expansion, and
encapsulation allows for new layers to evolve more freely while older systems
stay conserved.

